The Mysteries of Udolpho

On the pleasant banks of the river Garonne, in the south of France, stood the château of Monsieur St. Aubert.It was a modest house, half hidden by woods, with the great blue line of the Pyrenees rising far away to the south.St. Aubert had once known the wider world, but he had seen enough of its noise and its falseness, and had chosen to leave it.

Here at La Vallée he lived quietly with his wife and his one surviving child, a daughter named Emily.He filled his days with his books, his music, and the study of plants, and every evening he walked through the same well-loved fields.Madame St. Aubert was gentle and often unwell, and the small family was bound together by a deep and easy affection.

Emily, now eighteen, had her father’s love of books and her mother’s soft manner.She was tall and gracefully made, with a face that showed every feeling as it passed.She loved best to wander alone near the little fishing-house by the stream, reading poetry or watching the light change on the mountains.

Sometimes she wrote verses of her own, though she was shy of showing them to anyone.Her father delighted in her, and yet one thing about her made him uneasy.He saw that her feelings were unusually strong, and that beauty or sorrow could move her almost past bearing.

Such a nature, he believed, was a kind of danger in a world that does not spare the tender-hearted.He tried, gently, to teach her self-command: to feel deeply, but not to be ruled by feeling.“Do not be proud of your sensibility,” he told her; a mind that cannot govern itself, however fine, brings its owner grief.

Emily listened, and loved him the more for it, though she was still too young to know how much she would need the lesson.For the present the days passed one like another at La Vallée, calm and bright, and none of them guessed how soon that quiet would end.