Mme. de Renal intended to do some work but fell into a deep sleep; when she woke, she was not so alarmed as she should have been. She was too happy to think ill of anything. Artless and innocent, this good provincial woman had never tortured her soul with trying to squeeze a bit of sensibility from it for some novel shade of feeling or of distress. Entirely occupied, before Julien's arrival, with that pile of work which is the lot of any good mother when she lives far from Paris, Mme. de Renal had the same opinion of the passions that we have of the lottery: a cheat certainly and a happiness pursued only by fools.