My father locked himself up in his study more than ever, avoiding as much as possible staying in the house where he was hardly seen at times other than meal hours. He also took to making distant trips, increased the number of committees and societies over which he presided, found means to create for himself new distractions and business affairs far away from home. The Council General, the Agricultural Commission, the jury of the Court of Assizes were of great help to him for that purpose. When some one spoke to him of his wife he answered, shaking his head:
"Ah, I am very uneasy, very much wrought up over it. How will it end? I must confess I fear she may become insane. . . . ."
And when some one expressed his unbelief:
"No, no, I am not joking. . . . You know well that it runs in her family, their heads don't seem to be very strong!"
Nevertheless reproach never came from his lips, although he realized the embarrassing condition in which this situation placed his business affairs and which he ascribed to nothing but the irritating obduracy of my mother in not wanting to try anything that might cure her.
It was in these sad surroundings that I grew up. I came to this world a tiny, sickly child. What cares, what fierce tenderness, what deadly anguishes I brought with me! In the presence of the puny creature that I was, sustained by a breath of life so feeble that it could be guessed at only by a rattling sound in my throat, my mother forgot her own sorrows. Maternity revived her worn-out energy, awakened her conscience to new duties, to new sacred responsibilities which now devolved upon her. What ardent nights, what feverish days she spent bent over the cradle where lay something born of her own flesh and
