“‘Why, Jeanne!’ she cried, ‘how could you be in trouble and not tell me? You know how anxious we are to help.’
“‘Oh, mademoiselle, we are not really in want yet; we still have some potatoes and a few cabbages, only the children don’t like them. They shout and cry for bread. You know children are so unreasonable.’
“Well, dear lady, you too have done a kind thing in writing. I would not write for fear of boring you, so waited for your daughter’s return. She came not! My anxiety choked me. You see, madame, creatures such as I are unreasonable.
“Yet surely I—if anyone—hardly need to learn lessons that have been taught me already by so many knife-thrusts in my heart.
“It seems to me that you are sad, and that makes me the more.... From to-day I mean to restrain my language, to talk of outward things only.
“You know what is in my heart—all that I do not say.
“Perhaps you already know that, thanks to the thousand and one annoyances brought upon me by the Conservatoire committee, my Trojans was not performed yesterday. Still, I thank you for the time you have spent in thought with us in the concert-room. My son, who has done well in Mexico, has just landed at St Nazaire. He is first lieutenant of his ship, and, as he cannot come to Paris, I am going to Brittany to see him. He is a good boy, but is, unfortunately, too much like his father, and cannot reconcile himself to the commonplaces and troubles of this world.
“We love each other dearly.
“My aged mother-in-law, whom I have promised never to leave, takes the greatest care of me, and accepts unquestioningly my gloomy tempers. I read again and again Shakespeare, Virgil, Homer, Paul and Virginia, and travels of all kinds. I am horribly bored and suffer agonies from neuralgia that doctors have tried in vain, for nine years, to cure.
“When the pains of mind, body and estate grow too much for me, I take three drops of laudanum to snatch some sleep.