For some time after that Jeanne could not touch bread.
When the post-chaise drew up before the door with the baron's smiling face looking out of the window, Jeanne felt fonder of her parents and more pleased to see them than she had ever been before; but when she saw her mother she was overcome with surprise and grief. The baroness looked ten years older than when she had left Les Peuples six months before. Her huge, flabby cheeks were suffused with blood, her eyes had a glazed look, and she could not move a step unless she was supported on either side; she drew her breath with so much difficulty that only to hear her made everyone around her draw theirs painfully also.
The baron, who had lived with her and seen her every day, had not noticed the gradual change in his wife, and if she had complained or said her breathing and the heavy feeling about her heart were getting worse, he had answered:
"Oh, no, my dear. You have always been like this."
Jeanne went to her own room and cried bitterly when she had taken her parents upstairs. Then she went to her father and, throwing herself in his arms, said, with her eyes still full of tears:
"Oh, how changed mother is! What is the matter with her? Do tell me what is the matter with her?"
"Do you think she is changed?" asked the baron in surprise. "It must be your fancy. You know I have been with her all this time, and to me she seems just the same as she has always been; she is not any worse."
"Your mother is in a bad way," said Julien to his wife that evening. "I don't think she's good for much now."
Jeanne burst into tears.
"Oh, good gracious!" went on Julien irritably. "I don't say that she is dangerously ill. You always see so much more than is meant. She is changed, that's all; it's only natural she should begin to break up at her age."