The Count of Monte Cristo

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Madeleine Radelle, was pale, meagre, and sickly-looking. Born in the
neighborhood of Arles, she had shared in the beauty for which its women
are proverbial; but that beauty had gradually withered beneath the
devastating influence of the slow fever so prevalent among dwellers
by the ponds of Aiguemortes and the marshes of Camargue. She remained
nearly always in her second-floor chamber, shivering in her chair, or
stretched languid and feeble on her bed, while her husband kept his
daily watch at the door--a duty he performed with so much the greater
willingness, as it saved him the necessity of listening to the endless
plaints and murmurs of his helpmate, who never saw him without breaking
out into bitter invectives against fate; to all of which her husband
would calmly return an unvarying reply, in these philosophic words:--

"Hush, La Carconte. It is God's pleasure that things should be so."

The sobriquet of La Carconte had been bestowed on Madeleine Radelle
from the fact that she had been born in a village, so called, situated