gaze is turned from the gloomy and lowering horizon to the mountains of Beaujeu, spotted on their sides by black pines, and severed by large inclined meadows, where the oxen of Charolais fatten, and to the valley of the Saone, that immense ocean of verdure, here and there topped by high steeples.  The belt of the higher Alps, covered with snow and the apex of Mont Blanc, which overhangs the whole, frame this extensive landscape.  There is in this something of the vastness of the infinite sea:  and if on its bounded side it may inspire recollection and resignation, in its open part it seems to solicit thought to expand, and to convey the soul to far off hopes and to the eminences of imagination.

Such was, for five years, the bounded horizon of this young woman.  It was there that she plunged into the plenitude of that nature of which, in her infancy, she had so frequently dreamed, and in which she had perceived only some small bits of sky, and some confused perspectives of royal forests, from the height of her window over the roofs of Paris.  It was there that her simple tastes and loving soul found nutriment and scope for her sensibility.

Her life was there divided between household cares, the improvement of her mind, and active charity—­that cultivator of the heart.  Adored by the peasants, whose protectress she was, she applied to the consolation of their miseries the little to spare which a rigid economy left to her, and to the cure of their maladies the knowledge she had acquired in medicine.  She was fetched from three and four leagues’ distance to visit a sick person.  On Sunday the steps of her court-yard were covered with invalids, who came to seek relief, or convalescents, who came to bring her proofs of their gratitude; baskets of chestnuts, goats’ milk cheeses, or apples from their orchards.  She was delighted at finding the country people grateful and sensible of kindness.  She had drawn her own picture of the people residing in the vicinity of large cities.  The burning of chateaux, during the outbreak and massacres of September, taught her subsequently that these seas of men, then so calm, have tempests more terrible than those of the ocean, and that society requires institutions, just as the waves require a bed, and strength is as indispensable as justice to the government of a people.

XIII.

The hour of the Revolution of ’89 had struck, and came upon her in the bosom of this retreat.  Intoxicated with philosophy, passionately devoted to the ideal of humanity, an adorer of antique liberty, she became on fire at the first spark of this focus of new ideas;—­she believed with all her faith, that this revolution, like a child born without a mother’s sufferings, must regenerate the human race, destroy the misery of the working classes, for whom she felt the deepest sympathy, and renew the face of the earth.  Even the piety of great souls has its imagination.  The generous illusion of France at this epoch was equal to the work which France had to accomplish.  If she had not dared to hope so much, she would have dared nothing:  her faith was her strength.