UNE VIE OR, THE HISTORY OF A HEART

from:  UNE VIE, A Piece of String, And Other Stories

CHAPTER 1  THE HOME BY THE SEA

CHAPTER 2  HAPPY DAYS

CHAPTER 3  M. DE LAMARE

CHAPTER 4  MARRIAGE AND DISILLUSION

CHAPTER 5  CORSICA AND A NEW LIFE

CHAPTER 6  DISENCHANTMENT

CHAPTER 7  JEANNE'S DISCOVERY

CHAPTER 8  MATERNITY

CHAPTER 9  DEATH OF LA BARONNE

CHAPTER 10  RETRIBUTION

CHAPTER 11  THE DEVELOPMENT OF PAUL

CHAPTER 12  A NEW HOME

CHAPTER 13  JEANNE IN PARIS

CHAPTER 14  LIGHT AT EVENTIDE

 CHAPTER 1  THE HOME BY THE SEA

The weather was most distressing. It had rained all night. The roaring of the overflowing gutters filled the deserted streets, in which the houses, like sponges, absorbed the humidity, which penetrating to the interior, made the walls sweat from cellar to garret. Jeanne had left the convent the day before, free for all time, ready to seize all the joys of life, of which she had dreamed so long. She was afraid her father would not set out for the new home in bad weather, and for the hundredth time since daybreak she examined the horizon. Then she noticed that she had omitted to put her calendar in her travelling bag. She took from the wall the little card which bore in golden figures the date of the current year, 1819. Then she marked with a pencil the first four columns, drawing a line through the name of each saint up to the 2d of May, the day that she left the convent. A voice outside the door called"Jeannette." Jeanne replied,"Come in, papa." And her father entered. Baron Simon-Jacques Le Perthuis des Vauds was a gentleman of the last century, eccentric and good. An enthusiastic disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he had the tenderness of a lover for nature, in the fields, in the woods and in the animals. Of aristocratic birth, he hated instinctively the year 1793, but being a philosopher by temperament and liberal by education, he execrated tyranny with an inoffensive and declamatory hatred. His great strength and his great weakness was his kind-heartedness, which had not arms enough to caress, to give, to embrace; the benevolence of a god, that gave freely, without questioning; in a word, a kindness of inertia that became almost a vice. A man of theory, he thought out a plan of education for his daughter, to the end that she might become happy, good, upright and gentle. She had lived at home until the age of twelve, when, despite the tears of her mother, she w