My heart was oppressed with inexpressible anguish.  Crouched in a corner, with my eyes fixed upon this dismal picture, I felt the cold slowly creeping upon me, and I said to myself with bitterness: 

“Let us die, since poverty is a dungeon guarded by suspicion, apathy, and contempt, and from which it is vain to try to escape; let us die, since there is no place for us at the banquet of the living!”

And I tried to rise to join my mother again, and to wait at her feet for the hour of release.

This effort dispelled my dream, and I awoke with a start.

I looked around me; my lamp was expiring, the fire in my stove extinguished, and my half-opened door was letting in an icy wind.  I got up, with a shiver, to shut and double-lock it; then I made for the alcove, and went to bed in haste.

But the cold kept me awake a long time, and my thoughts continued the interrupted dream.

The pictures I had lately accused of exaggeration now seemed but a too faithful representation of reality; and I went to sleep without being able to recover my optimism—­or my warmth.

Thus did a cold stove and a badly closed door alter my point of view.  All went well when my blood circulated properly; all looked gloomy when the cold laid hold on me.

This reminds me of the story of the duchess who was obliged to pay a visit to the neighboring convent on a winter’s day.  The convent was poor, there was no wood, and the monks had nothing but their discipline and the ardor of their prayers to keep out the cold.  The duchess, who was shivering with cold, returned home, greatly pitying the poor monks.  While the servants were taking off her cloak and adding two more logs to her fire, she called her steward, whom she ordered to send some wood to the convent immediately.  She then had her couch moved close to the fireside, the warmth of which soon revived her.  The recollection of what she had just suffered was speedily lost in her present comfort, when the steward came in again to ask how many loads of wood he was to send.

“Oh! you may wait,” said the great lady carelessly; “the weather is very much milder.”

Thus, man’s judgments are formed less from reason than from sensation; and as sensation comes to him from the outward world, so he finds himself more or less under its influence; by little and little he imbibes a portion of his habits and feelings from it.

It is not, then, without cause that, when we wish to judge of a stranger beforehand, we look for indications of his character in the circumstances which surround him.  The things among which we live are necessarily made to take our image, and we unconsciously leave in them a thousand impressions of our minds.  As we can judge by an empty bed of the height and attitude of him who has slept in it, so the abode of every man discovers to a close observer the extent of his intelligence and the feelings of his heart.  Bernardin de St.-Pierre has related the story of a young girl who refused a suitor because he would never have flowers or domestic animals in his house.  Perhaps the sentence was severe, but not without reason.  We may presume that a man insensible to beauty and to humble affection must be ill prepared to feel the enjoyments of a happy marriage.