Comparing the end with the beginning, she even felt a sort of love for her torturer.

To gain some power of self-defence, to become something less a cipher in the household, supported, unknown to herself, by her own means, the poor helot had but a single chance, and that chance never came to her.
Celeste had no child.

This barrenness, which, from month to month, brought floods of tears from her eyes, was long the cause of Brigitte's scorn; she reproached the poor woman bitterly for being fit for nothing, not even to bear children.

The old maid, who had longed to love her brother's child as if it were her own, was unable, for years, to reconcile herself to this irremediable sterility.
At the time when our history begins, namely, in 1840, Celeste, then forty-six years old, had ceased to weep; she now had the certainty of never being a mother.

And here is a strange thing.