The mildness of the beautiful summer days finally roused her, and she lived along in a state of sad languor until autumn.
When the cold weather returned, she was brought face to face, for the first time, with the gloomy future. What was she to do? Nothing. What was going to happen to her henceforth? Nothing. What expectation, what hope, could revive her heart? None. A doctor who was consulted declared that she would never have children.
Sharper, more penetrating still than the year before, the cold made her suffer continually.
She stretched out her shivering hands to the big flames. The glaring fire burned her face; but icy whiffs seemed to glide down her back and to penetrate between her skin and her underclothing. And she shivered from head to foot. Innumerable draughts of air appeared to have taken up their abode in the apartment, living, crafty currents of air as cruel as enemies. She encountered them at every moment; they blew on her incessantly their perfidious and frozen hatred, now on her face, now on her hands, and now on her back.
Once more she spoke of a furnace; but her husband listened to her request as if she were asking for the moon. The introduction of such an apparatus at Parville appeared to him as impossible as the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone.
Having been at Rouen on business one day, he brought back to his wife a dainty foot warmer made of copper, which he laughingly called a “portable furnace”; and he considered that this would prevent her henceforth from ever being cold.
Toward the end of December she understood that she could not always live like this, and she said timidly one evening at dinner:
“Listen, dear! Are we not going to spend a week or two in Paris before spring:”
He was stupefied.
“In Paris? In Paris? But what are we to do there? Ah! no by Jove! We are better off here. What odd ideas come into your head sometimes.”