When the cold weather returned, she was brought face to face, for the
first time, with the gloomy future. What was she to do? Nothing. What was
going to happen to her henceforth? Nothing. What expectation, what hope,
could revive her heart? None. A doctor who was consulted declared that
she would never have children.

Sharper, more penetrating still than the year before, the cold made her
suffer continually.

She stretched out her shivering hands to the big flames. The glaring fire
burned her face; but icy whiffs seemed to glide down her back and to
penetrate between her skin and her underclothing. And she shivered from
head to foot. Innumerable draughts of air appeared to have taken up their
abode in the apartment, living, crafty currents of air as cruel as
enemies. She encountered them at every moment; they blew on her
incessantly their perfidious and frozen hatred, now on her face, now on
her hands, and now on her back.

Once more she spoke of a furnace; but her husband listened to her request
as if she were asking for the moon. The introduction of such an apparatus
at Parville appeared to him as impossible as the discovery of the
Philosopher's Stone.

Having been at Rouen on business one day, he brought back to his wife a
dainty foot warmer made of copper, which he laughingly called a "portable
furnace"; and he considered that this would prevent her henceforth from
ever being cold.

Toward the end of December she understood that she could not always live