PART II. HOW THE SON DIED

THE HATED SON

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION

To Madame la Baronne James Rothschild.

THE HATED SON

PART I. HOW THE MOTHER LIVED

CHAPTER I. A BEDROOM OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

On a winter’s night, about two in the morning, the Comtesse Jeanne

d’Herouville felt such violent pains that in spite of her inexperience,

she was conscious of an approaching confinement; and the instinct which

makes us hope for ease in a change of posture induced her to sit up

in her bed, either to study the nature of these new sufferings, or to

reflect on her situation. She was a prey to cruel fears,--caused less

by the dread of a first lying-in, which terrifies most women, than by

certain dangers which awaited her child.

In order not to awaken her husband who was sleeping beside her, the poor

woman moved with precautions which her intense terror made as minute as

those of a prisoner endeavoring to escape. Though the pains became

more and more severe, she ceased to feel them, so completely did she

concentrate her own strength on the painful effort of resting her two

moist hands on the pillow and so turning her suffering body from a

posture in which she could find no ease. At the slightest rustling of

the huge green silk coverlet, under which she had slept but little since

her marriage, she stopped as though she had rung a bell. Forced to watch

the count, she divided her attention between the folds of the rustling

stuff and a large swarthy face, the moustache of which was brushing her

shoulder. When some noisier breath than usual left her husband’s lips,

she was filled with a sudden terror that revived the color driven from

her cheeks by her double anguish.

The prisoner reached the prison door in the dead of night and trying

to noiselessly turn the key in a pitiless lock, was never more timidly

bold.

When the countess had succeeded in rising to her seat without awakening

her keeper, she made a gesture of childlike joy which revealed the

touching naivete of her nature. But the half-formed smile on her burning

lips was quickly suppressed; a thought came to darken that pure brow,

and her long blue eyes resumed their sad expression. She gave a sigh

and again laid her hands, not without precaution, on the fatal conjugal

pillow. Then--as if for the first time since her marriage she found

herself free in thought and action--she looked at the things around her,

stretching out her neck with little darting motions like those of a bird

in its cage. Seeing her thus, it was easy to divine that she had once

been all gaiety and light-heartedness, but that fate had suddenly mown

down her hopes, and changed her ingenuous gaiety to sadness.

The chamber was one of those which, to this day octogenarian porters

of old chateaus point out to visitors as “the state bedroom where Louis

XIII. once slept.” Fine pictures, mostly brown in tone, were framed

in walnut, the delicate carvings of which were blackened by time. The

rafters of the ceiling formed compartments adorned with arabesques in

the style of the preceding century, which preserved the colors of the

chestnut wood. These decorations, severe in tone, reflected the light

so little that it was difficult to see their designs, even when the sun

shone full into that long and wide and lofty chamber. The silver lamp,

placed upon the mantel of the vast fireplace, lighted the room so feebly

that its quivering gleam could be compared only to the nebulous stars

which appear at moments through the dun gray clouds of an autumn night.

The fantastic figures crowded on the marble of the fireplace, which was

opposite to the bed, were so grotesquely hideous that she dared not fix

her eyes upon them, fearing to see them move, or to hear a startling

laugh from their gaping and twisted mouths.

At this moment a tempest was growling in the chimney, giving to every

puff of wind a lugubrious meaning,--the vast size of the flute putting

the hearth into such close communication with the skies above that the

embers upon it had a sort of respiration; they sparkled and went out at

the will of the wind. The arms of the family of Herouville, carved in

white marble with their mantle and supporters, gave the appearance of

a tomb to this species of edifice, which formed a pendant to the bed,

another erection raised to the glory of Hymen. Modern architects would

have been puzzled to decide whether the room had been built for the bed

or the bed for the room. Two cupids playing on the walnut headboard,

wreathed with garlands, might have passed for angels; and columns of

the same wood, supporting the tester were carved with mythological

allegories, the explanation of which could have been found either in the

Bible or Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Take away the bed, and the same tester

would have served in a church for the canopy of the pulpit or the

seats of the wardens. The married pair mounted by three steps to this

sumptuous couch, which stood upon a platform and was hung with curtains

of green silk covered with brilliant designs called “ramages”--possibly

because the birds of gay plumage there depicted were supposed to

sing. The folds of these immense curtains were so stiff that in the

semi-darkness they might have been taken for some metal fabric. On the

green velvet hanging, adorned with gold fringes, which covered the foot

of this lordly couch the superstition of the Comtes d’Herouville had

affixed a large crucifix, on which their chaplain placed a fresh branch

of sacred box when he renewed at Easter the holy water in the basin at

the foot of the cross.

On one side of the fireplace stood a large box or wardrobe of choice

woods magnificently carved, such as brides receive even now in the

provinces on their wedding day. These old chests, now so much in request

by antiquaries, were the arsenals from which women drew the rich and

elegant treasures of their personal adornment,--laces, bodices,

high collars and ruffs, gowns of price, alms-purses, masks, gloves,

veils,--in fact all the inventions of coquetry in the sixteenth century.

On the other side, by way of symmetry, was another piece of furniture,

somewhat similar in shape, where the countess kept her books, papers,

and jewels. Antique chairs covered with damask, a large and greenish

mirror, made in Venice, and richly framed in a sort of rolling

toilet-table, completed the furnishings of the room. The floor was

covered with a Persian carpet, the richness of which proved the

gallantry of the count; on the upper step of the bed stood a little

table, on which the waiting-woman served every night in a gold or silver

cup a drink prepared with spices.

After we have gone some way in life we know the secret influence exerted

by places on the condition of the soul. Who has not had his darksome

moments, when fresh hope has come into his heart from things that

surrounded him? The fortunate, or the unfortunate man, attributes an

intelligent countenance to the things among which he lives; he listens

to them, he consults them--so naturally superstitious is he. At

this moment the countess turned her eyes upon all these articles of

furniture, as if they were living beings whose help and protection she

implored; but the answer of that sombre luxury seemed to her inexorable.

Suddenly the tempest redoubled. The poor young woman could augur nothing

favorable as she listened to the threatening heavens, the changes of

which were interpreted in those credulous days according to the ideas

or the habits of individuals. Suddenly she turned her eyes to the two

arched windows at the end of the room; but the smallness of their panes

and the multiplicity of the leaden lines did not allow her to see the

sky and judge if the world were coming to an end, as certain monks,

eager for donations, affirmed. She might easily have believed in such

predictions, for the noise of the angry sea, the waves of which beat

against the castle wall, combined with the mighty voice of the tempest,

so that even the rocks appeared to shake. Though her sufferings were now

becoming keener and less endurable, the countess dared not awaken her

husband; but she turned and examined his features, as if despair

were urging her to find a consolation there against so many sinister

forebodings.

If matters were sad around the poor young woman, that face,

notwithstanding the tranquillity of sleep, seemed sadder still. The

light from the lamp, flickering in the draught, scarcely reached beyond

the foot of the bed and illumined the count’s head capriciously; so that

the fitful movements of its flash upon those features in repose produced

the effect of a struggle with angry thought. The countess was scarcely

reassured by perceiving the cause of that phenomenon. Each time that a

gust of wind projected the light upon the count’s large face, casting

shadows among its bony outlines, she fancied that her husband was about

to fix upon her his two insupportably stern eyes.

Implacable as the war then going on between the Church and Calvinism,

the count’s forehead was threatening even while he slept. Many furrows,

produced by the emotions of a warrior life, gave it a vague resemblance

to the vermiculated stone which we see in the buildings of that period;

his hair, like the whitish lichen of old oaks, gray before its time,

surrounded without grace a cruel brow, where religious intolerance

showed its passionate brutality. The shape of the aquiline nose, which

resembled the beak of a bird of prey, the black and crinkled lids of the

yellow eyes, the prominent bones of a hollow face, the rigidity of the

wrinkles, the disdain expressed in the lower lip, were all expressive

of ambition, despotism, and power, the more to be feared because

the narrowness of the skull betrayed an almost total absence of

intelligence, and a mere brute courage devoid of generosity. The face

was horribly disfigured by a large transversal scar which had the

appearance of a second mouth on the right cheek.

At the age of thirty-three the count, anxious to distinguish himself

in that unhappy religious war the signal for which was given on

Saint-Bartholomew’s day, had been grievously wounded at the siege of

Rochelle. The misfortune of this wound increased his hatred against the

partisans of what the language of that day called “the Religion,” but,

by a not unnatural turn of mind, he included in that antipathy all

handsome men. Before the catastrophe, however, he was so repulsively

ugly that no lady had ever been willing to receive him as a suitor. The

only passion of his youth was for a celebrated woman called La Belle

Romaine. The distrust resulting from this new misfortune made him

suspicious to the point of not believing himself capable of inspiring a

true passion; and his character became so savage that when he did have

some successes in gallantry he owed them to the terror inspired by

his cruelty. The left hand of this terrible Catholic, which lay on

the outside of the bed, will complete this sketch of his character.

Stretched out as if to guard the countess, as a miser guards his hoard,

that enormous hand was covered with hair so thick, it presented such

a network of veins and projecting muscles, that it gave the idea of a

branch of birch clasped with a growth of yellowing ivy.

Children looking at the count’s face would have thought him an ogre,

terrible tales of whom they knew by heart. It was enough to see the

width and length of the space occupied by the count in the bed, to

imagine his gigantic proportions. When awake, his gray eyebrows hid his

eyelids in a way to heighten the light of his eye, which glittered with

the luminous ferocity of a wolf skulking on the watch in a forest. Under

his lion nose, with its flaring nostrils, a large and ill-kept moustache

(for he despised all toilet niceties) completely concealed the upper

lip. Happily for the countess, her husband’s wide mouth was silent

at this moment, for the softest sounds of that harsh voice made her

tremble. Though the Comte d’Herouville was barely fifty years of age,

he appeared at first sight to be sixty, so much had the toils of war,

without injuring his robust constitution, dilapidated him physically.

The countess, who was now in her nineteenth year, made a painful

contrast to that large, repulsive figure. She was fair and slim. Her

chestnut locks, threaded with gold, played upon her neck like russet

shadows, and defined a face such as Carlo Dolce has painted for his

ivory-toned madonnas,--a face which now seemed ready to expire under

the increasing attacks of physical pain. You might have thought her the

apparition of an angel sent from heaven to soften the iron will of the

terrible count.

“No, he will not kill us!” she cried to herself mentally, after

contemplating her husband for a long time. “He is frank, courageous,

faithful to his word--faithful to his word!”

Repeating that last sentence in her thoughts, she trembled violently,

and remained as if stupefied.

To understand the horror of her present situation, we must add that

this nocturnal scene took place in 1591, a period when civil war raged

throughout France, and the laws had no vigor. The excesses of the

League, opposed to the accession of Henri IV., surpassed the calamities

of the religious wars. License was so universal that no one was

surprised to see a great lord kill his enemy in open day. When a

military expedition, having a private object, was led in the name of the

King or of the League, one or other of these parties applauded it. It

was thus that Blagny, a soldier, came near becoming a sovereign prince

at the gates of France. Sometime before Henri III.’s death, a court lady

murdered a nobleman who made offensive remarks about her. One of the

king’s minions remarked to him:--

“Hey! vive Dieu! sire, she daggered him finely!”

The Comte d’Herouville, one of the most rabid royalists in Normandy,

kept the part of that province which adjoins Brittany under subjection

to Henri IV. by the rigor of his executions. The head of one of the

richest families in France, he had considerably increased the revenues

of his great estates by marrying seven months before the night on which

this history begins, Jeanne de Saint-Savin, a young lady who, by a not

uncommon chance in days when people were killed off like flies, had

suddenly become the representative of both branches of the Saint-Savin

family. Necessity and terror were the causes which led to this union.

At a banquet given, two months after the marriage, to the Comte and

Comtesse d’Herouville, a discussion arose on a topic which in those days

of ignorance was thought amusing: namely, the legitimacy of children

coming into the world ten months after the death of their fathers, or

seven months after the wedding day.

“Madame,” said the count brutally, turning to his wife, “if you give me

a child ten months after my death, I cannot help it; but be careful that

you are not brought to bed in seven months!”

“What would you do then, old bear?” asked the young Marquis de Verneuil,

thinking that the count was joking.

“I should wring the necks of mother and child!”

An answer so peremptory closed the discussion, imprudently started by

a seigneur from Lower Normandy. The guests were silent, looking with a

sort of terror at the pretty Comtesse d’Herouville. All were convinced

that if such an event occurred, her savage lord would execute his

threat.

The words of the count echoed in the bosom of the young wife, then

pregnant; one of those presentiments which furrow a track like lightning

through the soul, told her that her child would be born at seven months.

An inward heat overflowed her from head to foot, sending the life’s

blood to her heart with such violence that the surface of her body felt

bathed in ice. From that hour not a day had passed that the sense of

secret terror did not check every impulse of her innocent gaiety. The

memory of the look, of the inflections of voice with which the

count accompanied his words, still froze her blood, and silenced her

sufferings, as she leaned over that sleeping head, and strove to see

some sign of a pity she had vainly sought there when awake.

The child, threatened with death before its life began, made so vigorous

a movement that she cried aloud, in a voice that seemed like a sigh,

“Poor babe!”

She said no more; there are ideas that a mother cannot bear. Incapable

of reasoning at this moment, the countess was almost choked with the

intensity of a suffering as yet unknown to her. Two tears, escaping from

her eyes, rolled slowly down her cheeks, and traced two shining lines,

remaining suspended at the bottom of that white face, like dewdrops on

a lily. What learned man would take upon himself to say that the child

unborn is on some neutral ground, where the emotions of its mother do

not penetrate during those hours when soul clasps body and communicates

its impressions, when thought permeates blood with healing balm or

poisonous fluids? The terror that shakes the tree, will it not hurt the

fruit? Those words, “Poor babe!” were they dictated by a vision of the

future? The shuddering of this mother was violent; her look piercing.

The bloody answer given by the count at the banquet was a link

mysteriously connecting the past with this premature confinement. That

odious suspicion, thus publicly expressed, had cast into the memories of

the countess a dread which echoed to the future. Since that fatal gala,

she had driven from her mind, with as much fear as another woman would

have found pleasure in evoking them, a thousand scattered scenes of her

past existence. She refused even to think of the happy days when her

heart was free to love. Like as the melodies of their native land make

exiles weep, so these memories revived sensations so delightful that

her young conscience thought them crimes, and sued them to enforce still

further the savage threat of the count. There lay the secret of the

horror which was now oppressing her soul.

Sleeping figures possess a sort of suavity, due to the absolute repose

of both body and mind; but though that species of calmness softened

but slightly the harsh expression of the count’s features, all illusion

granted to the unhappy is so persuasive that the poor wife ended

by finding hope in that tranquillity. The roar of the tempest, now

descending in torrents of rain, seemed to her no more than a melancholy

moan; her fears and her pains both yielded her a momentary respite.

Contemplating the man to whom her life was bound, the countess

allowed herself to float into a reverie, the sweetness of which was so

intoxicating that she had no strength to break its charm. For a moment,

by one of those visions which in some way share the divine power, there

passed before her rapid images of a happiness lost beyond recall.

Jeanne in her vision saw faintly, and as if in a distant gleam of dawn,

the modest castle where her careless childhood had glided on; there were

the verdant lawns, the rippling brook, the little chamber, the scenes

of her happy play. She saw herself gathering flowers and planting them,

unknowing why they wilted and would not grow, despite her constancy in

watering them. Next, she saw confusedly the vast town and the vast house

blackened by age, to which her mother took her when she was seven years

old. Her lively memory showed her the old gray heads of the masters who

taught and tormented her. She remembered the person of her father; she

saw him getting off his mule at the door of the manor-house, and taking

her by the hand to lead her up the stairs; she recalled how her prattle

drove from his brow the judicial cares he did not always lay aside

with his black or his red robes, the white fur of which fell one day by

chance under the snipping of her mischievous scissors. She cast but one

glance at the confessor of her aunt, the mother-superior of a convent

of Poor Clares, a rigid and fanatical old man, whose duty it was to

initiate her into the mysteries of religion. Hardened by the severities

necessary against heretics, the old priest never ceased to jangle the

chains of hell; he told her of nothing but the vengeance of Heaven, and

made her tremble with the assurance that God’s eye was on her. Rendered

timid, she dared not raise her eyes in the priest’s presence, and ceased

to have any feeling but respect for her mother, whom up to that time she

had made a sharer in all her frolics. When she saw that beloved mother

turning her blue eyes towards her with an appearance of anger, a

religious terror took possession of the girl’s heart.

Then suddenly the vision took her to the second period of her childhood,

when as yet she understood nothing of the things of life. She thought

with an almost mocking regret of the days when all her happiness was to

work beside her mother in the tapestried salon, to pray in the church,

to sing her ballads to a lute, to read in secret a romance of chivalry,

to pluck the petals of a flower, discover what gift her father would

make her on the feast of the Blessed Saint-John, and find out the

meaning of speeches repressed before her. Passing thus from her childish

joys through the sixteen years of her girlhood, the grace of those

softly flowing years when she knew no pain was eclipsed by the

brightness of a memory precious though ill-fated. The joyous peace

of her childhood was far less sweet to her than a single one of the

troubles scattered upon the last two years of her childhood,--years that

were rich in treasures now buried forever in her heart.

The vision brought her suddenly to that morning, that ravishing morning,

when in the grand old parlor panelled and carved in oak, which served

the family as a dining-room, she saw her handsome cousin for the first

time. Alarmed by the seditions in Paris, her mother’s family had sent

the young courtier to Rouen, hoping that he could there be trained to

the duties of the magistracy by his uncle, whose office might some day

devolve upon him. The countess smiled involuntarily as she remembered

the haste with which she retired on seeing this relation whom she did

not know. But, in spite of the rapidity with which she opened and

shut the door, a single glance had put into her soul so vigorous an

impression of the scene that even at this moment she seemed to see it

still occurring. Her eye again wandered from the violet velvet mantle

embroidered with gold and lined with satin to the spurs on the boots,

the pretty lozenges slashed into the doublet, the trunk-hose, and the

rich collaret which gave to view a throat as white as the lace around

it. She stroked with her hand the handsome face with its tiny pointed

moustache, and “royale” as small as the ermine tips upon her father’s

hood.

In the silence of the night, with her eyes fixed on the green silk

curtains which she no longer saw, the countess, forgetting the storm,

her husband, and her fears, recalled the days which seemed to her

longer than years, so full were they,--days when she loved, and was

beloved!--and the moment when, fearing her mother’s sternness, she

had slipped one morning into her father’s study to whisper her girlish

confidences on his knee, waiting for his smile at her caresses to say

in his ear, “Will you scold me if I tell you something?” Once more she

heard her father say, after a few questions in reply to which she spoke

for the first time of her love, “Well, well, my child, we will think

of it. If he studies well, if he fits himself to succeed me, if he

continues to please you, I will be on your side.”

After that she had listened no longer; she had kissed her father, and,

knocking over his papers as she ran from the room, she flew to the great

linden-tree where, daily, before her formidable mother rose, she met

that charming cousin, Georges de Chaverny.

Faithfully the youth promised to study law and customs. He laid aside

the splendid trappings of the nobility of the sword to wear the sterner

costume of the magistracy.

“I like you better in black,” she said.

It was a falsehood, but by that falsehood she comforted her lover for

having thrown his dagger to the winds. The memory of the little schemes

employed to deceive her mother, whose severity seemed great, brought

back to her the soulful joys of that innocent and mutual and sanctioned

love; sometimes a rendezvous beneath the linden, where speech could

be freer than before witnesses; sometimes a furtive clasp, or a stolen

kiss,--in short, all the naive instalments of a passion that did not

pass the bounds of modesty. Reliving in her vision those delightful days

when she seemed to have too much happiness, she fancied that she kissed,

in the void, that fine young face with the glowing eyes, that rosy

mouth that spoke so well of love. Yes, she had loved Chaverny, poor

apparently; but what treasures had she not discovered in that soul as

tender as it was strong!

Suddenly her father died. Chaverny did not succeed him. The flames

of civil war burst forth. By Chaverny’s care she and her mother found

refuge in a little town of Lower Normandy. Soon the deaths of other

relatives made her one of the richest heiresses in France. Happiness

disappeared as wealth came to her. The savage and terrible face of Comte

d’Herouville, who asked her hand, rose before her like a thunder-cloud,

spreading its gloom over the smiling meadows so lately gilded by the

sun. The poor countess strove to cast from her memory the scenes of

weeping and despair brought about by her long resistance.

At last came an awful night when her mother, pale and dying, threw

herself at her daughter’s feet. Jeanne could save Chaverny’s life by

yielding; she yielded. It was night. The count, arriving bloody from

the battlefield was there; all was ready, the priest, the altar, the

torches! Jeanne belonged henceforth to misery. Scarcely had she time to

say to her young cousin who was set at liberty:--

“Georges, if you love me, never see me again!”

She heard the departing steps of her lover, whom, in truth, she never

saw again; but in the depths of her heart she still kept sacred his last

look which returned perpetually in her dreams and illumined them. Living

like a cat shut into a lion’s cage, the young wife dreaded at all hours

the claws of the master which ever threatened her. She knew that in

order to be happy she must forget the past and think only of the future;

but there were days, consecrated to the memory of some vanished joy,

when she deliberately made it a crime to put on the gown she had worn on

the day she had seen her lover for the first time.

“I am not guilty,” she said, “but if I seem guilty to the count it is as

if I were so. Perhaps I am! The Holy Virgin conceived without--”

She stopped. During this moment when her thoughts were misty and her

soul floated in a region of fantasy her naivete made her attribute to

that last look with which her lover transfixed her the occult power of

the visitation of the angel to the Mother of her Lord. This supposition,

worthy of the days of innocence to which her reverie had carried her

back, vanished before the memory of a conjugal scene more odious than

death. The poor countess could have no real doubt as to the legitimacy

of the child that stirred in her womb. The night of her marriage

reappeared to her in all the horror if its agony, bringing in its train

other such nights and sadder days.

“Ah! my poor Chaverny!” she cried, weeping, “you so respectful, so

gracious, YOU were always kind to me.”

She turned her eyes to her husband as if to persuade herself that that

harsh face contained a promise of mercy, dearly brought. The count was

awake. His yellow eyes, clear as those of a tiger, glittered beneath

their tufted eyebrows and never had his glance been so incisive. The

countess, terrified at having encountered it, slid back under the great

counterpane and was motionless.

“Why are you weeping?” said the count, pulling away the covering which

hid his wife.

That voice, always a terror to her, had a specious softness at this

moment which seemed to her of good augury.

“I suffer much,” she answered.

“Well, my pretty one, it is no crime to suffer; why did you tremble when

I looked at you? Alas! what must I do to be loved?” The wrinkles of his

forehead between the eyebrows deepened. “I see plainly you are afraid of

me,” he added, sighing.

Prompted by the instinct of feeble natures the countess interrupted the

count by moans, exclaiming:--

“I fear a miscarriage! I clambered over the rocks last evening and tired

myself.”

Hearing those words, the count cast so horribly suspicious a look upon

his wife, that she reddened and shuddered. He mistook the fear of the

innocent creature for remorse.

“Perhaps it is the beginning of a regular childbirth,” he said.

“What then?” she said.

“In any case, I must have a proper man here,” he said. “I will fetch

one.”

The gloomy look which accompanied these words overcame the countess,

who fell back in the bed with a moan, caused more by a sense of her fate

than by the agony of the coming crisis; that moan convinced the count of

the justice of the suspicions that were rising in his mind. Affecting

a calmness which the tones of his voice, his gestures, and looks

contradicted, he rose hastily, wrapped himself in a dressing-gown which

lay on a chair, and began by locking a door near the chimney through

which the state bedroom was entered from the reception rooms which

communicated with the great staircase.

Seeing her husband pocket that key, the countess had a presentiment of

danger. She next heard him open the door opposite to that which he had

just locked and enter a room where the counts of Herouville slept when

they did not honor their wives with their noble company. The countess

knew of that room only by hearsay. Jealousy kept her husband always with

her. If occasionally some military expedition forced him to leave her,

the count left more than one Argus, whose incessant spying proved his

shameful distrust.

In spite of the attention the countess now gave to the slightest noise,

she heard nothing more. The count had, in fact, entered a long gallery

leading from his room which continued down the western wing of the

castle. Cardinal d’Herouville, his great-uncle, a passionate lover of

the works of printing, had there collected a library as interesting for

the number as for the beauty of its volumes, and prudence had caused

him to build into the walls one of those curious inventions suggested by

solitude or by monastic fears. A silver chain set in motion, by means of

invisible wires, a bell placed at the bed’s head of a faithful servitor.

The count now pulled the chain, and the boots and spurs of the man on

duty sounded on the stone steps of a spiral staircase, placed in the

tall tower which flanked the western corner of the chateau on the ocean

side.

When the count heard the steps of his retainer he pulled back the rusty

bolts which protected the door leading from the gallery to the tower,

admitting into the sanctuary of learning a man of arms whose stalwart

appearance was in keeping with that of his master. This man, scarcely

awakened, seemed to have walked there by instinct; the horn lantern

which he held in his hand threw so feeble a gleam down the long library

that his master and he appeared in that visible darkness like two

phantoms.

“Saddle my war-horse instantly, and come with me yourself.”

This order was given in a deep tone which roused the man’s intelligence.

He raised his eyes to those of his master and encountered so piercing a

look that the effect was that of an electric shock.

“Bertrand,” added the count laying his right hand on the servant’s

arm, “take off your cuirass, and wear the uniform of a captain of

guerrillas.”

“Heavens and earth, monseigneur! What? disguise myself as a Leaguer!

Excuse me, I will obey you; but I would rather be hanged.”

The count smiled; then to efface that smile, which contrasted with the

expression of his face, he answered roughly:--

“Choose the strongest horse there is in the stable and follow me. We

shall ride like balls shot from an arquebuse. Be ready when I am ready.

I will ring to let you know.”

Bertrand bowed in silence and went away; but when he had gone a few

steps he said to himself, as he listened to the howling of the storm:--

“All the devils are abroad, jarnidieu! I’d have been surprised to

see this one stay quietly in his bed. We took Saint-Lo in just such a

tempest as this.”

The count kept in his room a disguise which often served him in his

campaign stratagems. Putting on the shabby buff-coat that looked as

thought it might belong to one of the poor horse-soldiers whose pittance

was so seldom paid by Henri IV., he returned to the room where his wife

was moaning.

“Try to suffer patiently,” he said to her. “I will founder my horse if

necessary to bring you speedy relief.”

These words were certainly not alarming, and the countess, emboldened by

them, was about to make a request when the count asked her suddenly:--

“Tell me where you keep your masks?”

“My masks!” she replied. “Good God! what do you want to do with them?”

“Where are they?” he repeated, with his usual violence.

“In the chest,” she said.

She shuddered when she saw her husband select from among her masks a

“touret de nez,” the wearing of which was as common among the ladies of

that time as the wearing of gloves in our day. The count became entirely

unrecognizable after he had put on an old gray felt hat with a broken

cock’s feather on his head. He girded round his loins a broad leathern

belt, in which he stuck a dagger, which he did not wear habitually.

These miserable garments gave him so terrifying an air and he approached

the bed with so strange a motion that the countess thought her last hour

had come.

“Ah! don’t kill us!” she cried, “leave me my child, and I will love you

well.”

“You must feel yourself very guilty to offer as the ransom of your

faults the love you owe me.”

The count’s voice was lugubrious and the bitter words were enforced by a

look which fell like lead upon the countess.

“My God!” she cried sorrowfully, “can innocence be fatal?”

“Your death is not in question,” said her master, coming out of a sort

of reverie into which he had fallen. “You are to do exactly, and for

love of me, what I shall now tell you.”

He flung upon the bed one of the two masks he had taken from the chest,

and smiled with derision as he saw the gesture of involuntary fear which

the slight shock of the black velvet wrung from his wife.

“You will give me a puny child!” he cried. “Wear that mask on your face

when I return. I’ll have no barber-surgeon boast that he has seen the

Comtesse d’Herouville.”

“A man!--why choose a man for the purpose?” she said in a feeble voice.

“Ho! ho! my lady, am I not master here?” replied the count.

“What matters one horror the more!” murmured the countess; but her

master had disappeared, and the exclamation did her no injury.

Presently, in a brief lull of the storm, the countess heard the gallop

of two horses which seemed to fly across the sandy dunes by which the

castle was surrounded. The sound was quickly lost in that of the waves.

Soon she felt herself a prisoner in the vast apartment, alone in the

midst of a night both silent and threatening, and without succor against

an evil she saw approaching her with rapid strides. In vain she sought

for some stratagem by which to save that child conceived in tears,

already her consolation, the spring of all her thoughts, the future of

her affections, her one frail hope.

Sustained by maternal courage, she took the horn with which her husband

summoned his men, and, opening a window, blew through the brass tube

feeble notes that died away upon the vast expanse of water, like a

bubble blown into the air by a child. She felt the uselessness of that

moan unheard of men, and turned to hasten through the apartments, hoping

that all the issues were not closed upon her. Reaching the library she

sought in vain for some secret passage; then, passing between the long

rows of books, she reached a window which looked upon the courtyard.

Again she sounded the horn, but without success against the voice of the

hurricane.

In her helplessness she thought of trusting herself to one of the

women,--all creatures of her husband,--when, passing into her oratory,

she found that the count had locked the only door that led to their

apartments. This was a horrible discovery. Such precautions taken

to isolate her showed a desire to proceed without witnesses to some

horrible execution. As moment after moment she lost hope, the pangs of

childbirth grew stronger and keener. A presentiment of murder, joined

to the fatigue of her efforts, overcame her last remaining strength. She

was like a shipwrecked man who sinks, borne under by one last wave less

furious than others he has vanquished. The bewildering pangs of her

condition kept her from knowing the lapse of time. At the moment when

she felt that, alone, without help, she was about to give birth to her

child, and to all her other terrors was added that of the accidents to

which her ignorance exposed her, the count appeared, without a sound

that let her know of his arrival. The man was there, like a demon

claiming at the close of a compact the soul that was sold to him.

He muttered angrily at finding his wife’s face uncovered; then after

masking her carefully, he took her in his arms and laid her on the bed

in her chamber.

CHAPTER II. THE BONESETTER

The terror of that apparition and hasty removal stopped for a moment

the physical sufferings of the countess, and so enabled her to cast

a furtive glance at the actors in this mysterious scene. She did not

recognize Bertrand, who was there disguised and masked as carefully as

his master. After lighting in haste some candles, the light of which

mingled with the first rays of the sun which were reddening the window

panes, the old servitor had gone to the embrasure of a window and stood

leaning against a corner of it. There, with his face towards the wall,

he seemed to be estimating its thickness, keeping his body in such

absolute immobility that he might have been taken for a statue. In the

middle of the room the countess beheld a short, stout man, apparently

out of breath and stupefied, whose eyes were blindfolded and his

features so distorted with terror that it was impossible to guess at

their natural expression.

“God’s death! you scamp,” said the count, giving him back his eyesight

by a rough movement which threw upon the man’s neck the bandage that had

been upon his eyes. “I warn you not to look at anything but the wretched

woman on whom you are now to exercise your skill; if you do, I’ll fling

you into the river that flows beneath those windows, with a collar round

your neck weighing a hundred pounds!”

With that, he pulled down upon the breast of his stupefied hearer the

cravat with which his eyes had been bandaged.

“Examine first if this can be a miscarriage,” he continued; “in which

case your life will answer to me for the mother’s; but, if the child is

living, you are to bring it to me.”

So saying, the count seized the poor operator by the body and placed him

before the countess, then he went himself to the depths of a bay-window

and began to drum with his fingers upon the panes, casting glances

alternately on his serving-man, on the bed, and at the ocean, as if he

were pledging to the expected child a cradle in the waves.

The man whom, with outrageous violence, the count and Bertrand had

snatched from his bed and fastened to the crupper of the latter’s

horse, was a personage whose individuality may serve to characterize the

period,--a man, moreover, whose influence was destined to make itself

felt in the house of Herouville.

Never in any age were the nobles so little informed as to natural

science, and never was judicial astrology held in greater honor; for

at no period in history was there a greater general desire to know

the future. This ignorance and this curiosity had led to the utmost

confusion in human knowledge; all things were still mere personal

experience; the nomenclatures of theory did not exist; printing was done

at enormous cost; scientific communication had little or no facility;

the Church persecuted science and all research which was based on the

analysis of natural phenomena. Persecution begat mystery. So, to the

people as well as to the nobles, physician and alchemist, mathematician

and astronomer, astrologer and necromancer were six attributes, all

meeting in the single person of the physician. In those days a superior

physician was supposed to be cultivating magic; while curing his patient

he was drawing their horoscopes. Princes protected the men of genius who

were willing to reveal the future; they lodged them in their palaces

and pensioned them. The famous Cornelius Agrippa, who came to France

to become the physician of Henri II., would not consent, as Nostradamus

did, to predict the future, and for this reason he was dismissed by

Catherine de’ Medici, who replaced him with Cosmo Ruggiero. The men

of science, who were superior to their times, were therefore seldom

appreciated; they simply inspired an ignorant fear of occult sciences

and their results.

Without being precisely one of the famous mathematicians, the man whom

the count had brought enjoyed in Normandy the equivocal reputation

which attached to a physician who was known to do mysterious works.

He belonged to the class of sorcerers who are still called in parts of

France “bonesetters.” This name belonged to certain untutored geniuses

who, without apparent study, but by means of hereditary knowledge and

the effect of long practice, the observations of which accumulated in

the family, were bonesetters; that is, they mended broken limbs and

cured both men and beasts of certain maladies, possessing secrets said

to be marvellous for the treatment of serious cases. But not only had

Maitre Antoine Beauvouloir (the name of the present bonesetter) a father

and grandfather who were famous practitioners, from whom he inherited

important traditions, he was also learned in medicine, and was given to

the study of natural science. The country people saw his study full of

books and other strange things which gave to his successes a coloring

of magic. Without passing strictly for a sorcerer, Antoine Beauvouloir

impressed the populace through a circumference of a hundred miles with

respect akin to terror, and (what was far more really dangerous for

himself) he held in his power many secrets of life and death which

concerned the noble families of that region. Like his father and

grandfather before him, he was celebrated for his skill in confinements

and miscarriages. In those days of unbridled disorder, crimes were so

frequent and passions so violent that the higher nobility often found

itself compelled to initiate Maitre Antoine Beauvouloir into secrets

both shameful and terrible. His discretion, so essential to his safety,

was absolute; consequently his clients paid him well, and his hereditary

practice greatly increased. Always on the road, sometimes roused in the

dead of night, as on this occasion by the count, sometimes obliged to

spend several days with certain great ladies, he had never married; in

fact, his reputation had hindered certain young women from accepting

him. Incapable of finding consolation in the practice of his profession,

which gave him such power over feminine weakness, the poor bonesetter

felt himself born for the joys of family and yet was unable to obtain

them.

The good man’s excellent heart was concealed by a misleading appearance

of joviality in keeping with his puffy cheeks and rotund figure, the

vivacity of his fat little body, and the frankness of his speech. He was

anxious to marry that he might have a daughter who should transfer his

property to some poor noble; he did not like his station as bonesetter

and wished to rescue his family name from the position in which the

prejudices of the times had placed it. He himself took willingly enough

to the feasts and jovialities which usually followed his principal

operations. The habit of being on such occasions the most important

personage in the company, had added to his natural gaiety a sufficient

dose of serious vanity. His impertinences were usually well received in

crucial moments when it often pleased him to perform his operations with

a certain slow majesty. He was, in other respects, as inquisitive as a

nightingale, as greedy as a hound, and as garrulous as all diplomatists

who talk incessantly and betray no secrets. In spite of these defects

developed in him by the endless adventures into which his profession led

him, Antoine Beauvouloir was held to be the least bad man in Normandy.

Though he belonged to the small number of minds who are superior to

their epoch, the strong good sense of a Norman countryman warned him

to conceal the ideas he acquired and the truths he from time to time

discovered.

As soon as he found himself placed by the count in presence of a woman

in childbirth, the bonesetter recovered his presence of mind. He felt

the pulse of the masked lady; not that he gave it a single thought, but

under cover of that medical action he could reflect, and he did reflect

on his own situation. In none of the shameful and criminal intrigues in

which superior force had compelled him to act as a blind instrument,

had precautions been taken with such mystery as in this case. Though his

death had often been threatened as a means of assuring the secrecy of

enterprises in which he had taken part against his will, his life had

never been so endangered as at that moment. He resolved, before all

things, to find out who it was who now employed him, and to discover

the actual extent of his danger, in order to save, if possible, his own

little person.

“What is the trouble?” he said to the countess in a low voice, as he

placed her in a manner to receive his help.

“Do not give him the child--”

“Speak loud!” cried the count in thundering tones which prevented

Beauvouloir from hearing the last word uttered by the countess. “If

not,” added the count who was careful to disguise his voice, “say your

‘In manus.’”

“Complain aloud,” said the leech to the lady; “cry! scream! Jarnidieu!

that man has a necklace that won’t fit you any better than me. Courage,

my little lady!”

“Touch her lightly!” cried the count.

“Monsieur is jealous,” said the operator in a shrill voice, fortunately

drowned by the countess’s cries.

For Maitre Beauvouloir’s safety Nature was merciful. It was more a

miscarriage than a regular birth, and the child was so puny that it

caused little suffering to the mother.

“Holy Virgin!” cried the bonesetter, “it isn’t a miscarriage, after

all!”

The count made the floor shake as he stamped with rage. The countess

pinched Beauvouloir.

“Ah! I see!” he said to himself. “It ought to be a premature birth,

ought it?” he whispered to the countess, who replied with an affirmative

sign, as if that gesture were the only language in which to express her

thoughts.

“It is not all clear to me yet,” thought the bonesetter.

Like all men in constant practice, he recognized at once a woman in her

first trouble as he called it. Though the modest inexperience of

certain gestures showed him the virgin ignorance of the countess, the

mischievous operator exclaimed:--

“Madame is delivered as if she knew all about it!”

The count then said, with a calmness more terrifying than his anger:--

“Give me the child.”

“Don’t give it him, for the love of God!” cried the mother, whose almost

savage cry awoke in the heart of the little man a courageous pity which

attached him, more than he knew himself, to the helpless infant rejected

by his father.

“The child is not yet born; you are counting your chicken before it is

hatched,” he said, coldly, hiding the infant.

Surprised to hear no cries, he examined the child, thinking it dead. The

count, seeing the deception, sprang upon him with one bound.

“God of heaven! will you give it to me?” he cried, snatching the hapless

victim which uttered feeble cries.

“Take care; the child is deformed and almost lifeless; it is a seven

months’ child,” said Beauvouloir clinging to the count’s arm. Then, with

a strength given to him by the excitement of his pity, he clung to the

father’s fingers, whispering in a broken voice: “Spare yourself a crime,

the child cannot live.”

“Wretch!” replied the count, from whose hands the bonesetter had

wrenched the child, “who told you that I wished to kill my son? Could I

not caress it?”

“Wait till he is eighteen years old to caress him in that way,” replied

Beauvouloir, recovering the sense of his importance. “But,” he

added, thinking of his own safety, for he had recognized the Comte

d’Herouville, who in his rage had forgotten to disguise his voice, “have

him baptized at once and do not speak of his danger to the mother, or

you will kill her.”

The gesture of satisfaction which escaped the count when the child’s

death was prophesied, suggested this speech to the bonesetter as the

best means of saving the child at the moment. Beauvouloir now hastened

to carry the infant back to its mother who had fainted, and he pointed

to her condition reprovingly, to warn the count of the results of his

violence. The countess had heard all; for in many of the great crises

of life the human organs acquire an otherwise unknown delicacy. But the

cries of the child, laid beside her on the bed, restored her to life

as if by magic; she fancied she heard the voices of angels, when, under

cover of the whimperings of the babe, the bonesetter said in her ear:--

“Take care of him, and he’ll live a hundred years. Beauvouloir knows

what he is talking about.”

A celestial sigh, a silent pressure of the hand were the reward of the

leech, who had looked to see, before yielding the frail little creature

to its mother’s embrace, whether that of the father had done no harm to

its puny organization. The half-crazed motion with which the mother hid

her son beside her and the threatening glance she cast upon the count

through the eye-holes of her mask, made Beauvouloir shudder.

“She will die if she loses that child too soon,” he said to the count.

During the latter part of this scene the lord of Herouville seemed to

hear and see nothing. Rigid, and as if absorbed in meditation, he stood

by the window drumming on its panes. But he turned at the last words

uttered by the bonesetter, with an almost frenzied motion, and came to

him with uplifted dagger.

“Miserable clown!” he cried, giving him the opprobrious name by which

the Royalists insulted the Leaguers. “Impudent scoundrel! your science

which makes you the accomplice of men who steal inheritances is all that

prevents me from depriving Normandy of her sorcerer.”

So saying, and to Beauvouloir’s great satisfaction, the count replaced

the dagger in its sheath.

“Could you not,” continued the count, “find yourself for once in

your life in the honorable company of a noble and his wife, without

suspecting them of the base crimes and trickery of your own kind? Kill

my son! take him from his mother! Where did you get such crazy ideas?

Am I a madman? Why do you attempt to frighten me about the life of that

vigorous child? Fool! I defy your silly talk--but remember this, since

you are here, your miserable life shall answer for that of the mother

and the child.”

The bonesetter was puzzled by this sudden change in the count’s

intentions. This show of tenderness for the infant alarmed him far more

than the impatient cruelty and savage indifference hitherto manifested

by the count, whose tone in pronouncing the last words seemed to

Beauvouloir to point to some better scheme for reaching his infernal

ends. The shrewd practitioner turned this idea over in his mind until a

light struck him.

“I have it!” he said to himself. “This great and good noble does not

want to make himself odious to his wife; he’ll trust to the vials of the

apothecary. I must warn the lady to see to the food and medicine of her

babe.”

As he turned toward the bed, the count who had opened a closet, stopped

him with an imperious gesture, holding out a purse. Beauvouloir saw

within its red silk meshes a quantity of gold, which the count now flung

to him contemptuously.

“Though you make me out a villain I am not released from the obligation

of paying you like a lord. I shall not ask you to be discreet. This man

here,” (pointing to Bertrand) “will explain to you that there are rivers

and trees everywhere for miserable wretches who chatter of me.”

So saying the count advanced slowly to the bonesetter, pushed a chair

noisily toward him, as if to invite him to sit down, as he did himself

by the bedside; then he said to his wife in a specious voice:--

“Well, my pretty one, so we have a son; this is a joyful thing for us.

Do you suffer much?”

“No,” murmured the countess.

The evident surprise of the mother, and the tardy demonstrations of

pleasure on the part of the father, convinced Beauvouloir that there

was some incident behind all this which escaped his penetration. He

persisted in his suspicion, and rested his hand on that of the young

wife, less to watch her condition than to convey to her some advice.

“The skin is good, I fear nothing for madame. The milk fever will come,

of course; but you need not be alarmed; that is nothing.”

At this point the wily bonesetter paused, and pressed the hand of the

countess to make her attentive to his words.

“If you wish to avoid all anxiety about your son, madame,” he continued,

“never leave him; suckle him yourself, and beware of the drugs of

apothecaries. The mother’s breast is the remedy for all the ills of

infancy. I have seen many births of seven months’ children, but I never

saw any so little painful as this. But that is not surprising; the child

is so small. You could put him in a wooden shoe! I am certain he doesn’t

weight more than sixteen ounces. Milk, milk, milk. Keep him always on

your breast and you will save him.”

These last words were accompanied by a significant pressure of the

fingers. Disregarding the yellow flames flashing from the eyeholes

of the count’s mask, Beauvouloir uttered these words with the serious

imperturbability of a man who intends to earn his money.

“Ho! ho! bonesetter, you are leaving your old felt hat behind you,” said

Bertrand, as the two left the bedroom together.

The reasons of the sudden mercy which the count had shown to his son

were to be found in a notary’s office. At the moment when Beauvouloir

arrested his murderous hand avarice and the Legal Custom of Normandy

rose up before him. Those mighty powers stiffened his fingers and

silenced the passion of his hatred. One cried out to him, “The property

of your wife cannot belong to the house of Herouville except through

a male child.” The other pointed to a dying countess and her fortune

claimed by the collateral heirs of the Saint-Savins. Both advised him

to leave to nature the extinction of that hated child, and to wait the

birth of a second son who might be healthy and vigorous before getting

rid of his wife and first-born. He saw neither wife nor child; he saw

the estates only, and hatred was softened by ambition. The mother, who

knew his nature, was even more surprised than the bonesetter, and she

still retained her instinctive fears, showing them at times openly, for

the courage of mothers seemed suddenly to have doubled her strength.

CHAPTER III. THE MOTHER’S LOVE

For several days the count remained assiduously beside his wife, showing

her attentions to which self-interest imparted a sort of tenderness.

The countess saw, however, that she alone was the object of these

attentions. The hatred of the father for his son showed itself in every

detail; he abstained from looking at him or touching him; he would rise

abruptly and leave the room if the child cried; in short, he seemed to

endure it living only through the hope of seeing it die. But even this

self-restraint was galling to the count. The day on which he saw that

the mother’s intelligent eye perceived, without fully comprehending,

the danger that threatened her son, he announced his departure on the

morning after the mass for her churching was solemnized, under pretext

of rallying his forces to the support of the king.

Such were the circumstances which preceded and accompanied the birth of

Etienne d’Herouville. If the count had no other reason for wishing the

death of this disowned son poor Etienne would still have been the

object of his aversion. In his eyes the misfortune of a rickety, sickly

constitution was a flagrant offence to his self-love as a father. If

he execrated handsome men, he also detested weakly ones, in whom mental

capacity took the place of physical strength. To please him a man should

be ugly in face, tall, robust, and ignorant. Etienne, whose debility

would bow him, as it were, to the sedentary occupations of knowledge,

was certain to find in his father a natural enemy. His struggle with

that colossus began therefore from his cradle, and his sole support

against that cruel antagonist was the heart of his mother whose love

increased, by a tender law of nature, as perils threatened him.

Buried in solitude after the abrupt departure of the count, Jeanne

de Saint-Savin owed to her child the only semblance of happiness that

consoled her life. She loved him as women love the child of an illicit

love; obliged to suckle him, the duty never wearied her. She would not

let her women care for the child. She dressed and undressed him, finding

fresh pleasures in every little care that he required. Happiness glowed

upon her face as she obeyed the needs of the little being. As Etienne

had come into the world prematurely, no clothes were ready for him,

and those that were needed she made herself,--with what perfection, you

know, ye mothers, who have worked in silence for a treasured child. The

days had never hours long enough for these manifold occupations and the

minute precautions of the nursing mother; those days fled by, laden with

her secret content.

The counsel of the bonesetter still continued in the countess’s mind.

She feared for her child, and would gladly not have slept in order to

be sure that no one approached him during her sleep; and she kept his

cradle beside her bed. In the absence of the count she ventured to send

for the bonesetter, whose name she had caught and remembered. To her,

Beauvouloir was a being to whom she owed an untold debt of gratitude;

and she desired of all things to question him on certain points relating

to her son. If an attempt were made to poison him, how should she foil

it? In what way ought she to manage his frail constitution? Was it well

to nurse him long? If she died, would Beauvouloir undertake the care of

the poor child’s health?

To the questions of the countess, Beauvouloir, deeply touched, replied

that he feared, as much as she did, an attempt to poison Etienne; but

there was, he assured her, no danger as long as she nursed the child;

and in future, when obliged to feed him, she must taste the food

herself.

“If Madame la comtesse,” he said, “feels anything strange upon her

tongue, a prickly, bitter, strong salt taste, reject the food. Let the

child’s clothes be washed under her own eye and let her keep the key of

the chest which contains them. Should anything happen to the child send

instantly to me.”

These instructions sank deep into Jeanne’s heart. She begged Beauvouloir

to regard her always as one who would do him any service in her power.

On that the poor man told her that she held his happiness in her hands.

Then he related briefly how the Comte d’Herouville had in his youth

loved a courtesan, known by the name of La Belle Romaine, who had

formerly belonged to the Cardinal of Lorraine. Abandoned by the

count before very long, she had died miserably, leaving a child named

Gertrude, who had been rescued by the Sisters of the Convent of Poor

Clares, the Mother Superior of which was Mademoiselle de Saint-Savin,

the countess’s aunt. Having been called to treat Gertrude for an

illness, he, Beauvouloir, had fallen in love with her, and if Madame la

comtesse, he said, would undertake the affair, she should not only more

than repay him for what she thought he had done for her, but she would

make him grateful to her for life. The count might, sooner or later,

be brought to take an interest in so beautiful a daughter, and might

protect her indirectly by making him his physician.

The countess, compassionate to all true love, promised to do her best,

and pursued the affair so warmly that at the birth of her second son she

did obtain from her husband a “dot” for the young girl, who was married

soon after to Beauvouloir. The “dot” and his savings enabled the

bonesetter to buy a charming estate called Forcalier near the castle

of Herouville, and to give his life the dignity of a student and man of

learning.

Comforted by the kind physician, the countess felt that to her were

given joys unknown to other mothers. Mother and child, two feeble

beings, seemed united in one thought, they understood each other long

before language could interpret between them. From the moment when

Etienne first turned his eyes on things about him with the stupid

eagerness of a little child, his glance had rested on the sombre

hangings of the castle walls. When his young ear strove to listen and to

distinguish sounds, he heard the monotonous ebb and flow of the sea

upon the rocks, as regular as the swinging of a pendulum. Thus places,

sounds, and things, all that strikes the senses and forms the character,

inclined him to melancholy. His mother, too, was doomed to live and die

in the clouds of melancholy; and to him, from his birth up, she was the

only being that existed on the earth, and filled for him the desert.

Like all frail children, Etienne’s attitude was passive, and in that he

resembled his mother. The delicacy of his organs was such that a sudden

noise, or the presence of a boisterous person gave him a sort of fever.

He was like those little insects for whom God seems to temper the

violence of the wind and the heat of the sun; incapable, like them,

of struggling against the slightest obstacle, he yielded, as they

do, without resistance or complaint, to everything that seemed to him

aggressive. This angelic patience inspired in the mother a sentiment

which took away all fatigue from the incessant care required by so frail

a being.

Soon his precocious perception of suffering revealed to him the power

that he had upon his mother; often he tried to divert her with caresses

and make her smile at his play; and never did his coaxing hands, his

stammered words, his intelligent laugh fail to rouse her from her

reverie. If he was tired, his care for her kept him from complaining.

“Poor, dear, little sensitive!” cried the countess as he fell asleep

tired with some play which had driven the sad memories from her mind,

“how can you live in this world? who will understand you? who will love

you? who will see the treasures hidden in that frail body? No one! Like

me, you are alone on earth.”

She sighed and wept. The graceful pose of her child lying on her knees

made her smile sadly. She looked at him long, tasting one of those

pleasures which are a secret between mothers and God. Etienne’s weakness

was so great that until he was a year and a half old she had never

dared to take him out of doors; but now the faint color which tinted the

whiteness of his skin like the petals of a wild rose, showed that life

and health were already there.

One morning the countess, giving herself up to the glad joy of all

mothers when their first child walks for the first time, was playing

with Etienne on the floor when suddenly she heard the heavy step of a

man upon the boards. Hardly had she risen with a movement of involuntary

surprise, when the count stood before her. She gave a cry, but

endeavored instantly to undo that involuntary wrong by going up to him

and offering her forehead for a kiss.

“Why not have sent me notice of your return?” she said.

“My reception would have been more cordial, but less frank,” he answered

bitterly.

Suddenly he saw the child. The evident health in which he found it wrung

from him a gesture of surprise mingled with fury. But he repressed his

anger, and began to smile.

“I bring good news,” he said. “I have received the governorship of

Champagne and the king’s promise to be made duke and peer. Moreover,

we have inherited a princely fortune from your cousin; that cursed

Huguenot, Georges de Chaverny is killed.”

The countess turned pale and dropped into a chair. She saw the secret of

the devilish smile on her husband’s face.

“Monsieur,” she said in a voice of emotion, “you know well that I loved

my cousin Chaverny. You will answer to God for the pain you inflict upon

me.”

At these words the eye of the count glittered; his lips trembled, but

he could not utter a word, so furious was he; he flung his dagger on the

table with such violence that the metal resounded like a thunder-clap.

“Listen to me,” he said in his strongest voice, “and remember my words.

I will never see or hear the little monster you hold in your arms. He

is your child, and not mine; there is nothing of me in him. Hide him, I

say, hide him from my sight, or--”

“Just God!” cried the countess, “protect us!”

“Silence!” said her husband. “If you do not wish me to throttle him, see

that I never find him in my way.”

“Then,” said the countess gathering strength to oppose her tyrant,

“swear to me that if you never meet him you will do nothing to injure

him. Can I trust your word as a nobleman for that?”

“What does all this mean?” said the count.

“If you will not swear, kill us now together!” cried the countess,

falling on her knees and pressing her child to her breast.

“Rise, madame. I give you my word as a man of honor to do nothing

against the life of that cursed child, provided he lives among the rocks

between the sea and the house, and never crosses my path. I will give

him that fisherman’s house down there for his dwelling, and the beach

for a domain. But woe betide him if I ever find him beyond those

limits.”

The countess began to weep.

“Look at him!” she said. “He is your son.”

“Madame!”

At that word, the frightened mother carried away the child whose heart

was beating like that of a bird caught in its nest. Whether innocence

has a power which the hardest men cannot escape, or whether the count

regretted his violence and feared to plunge into despair a creature so

necessary to his pleasures and also to his worldly prosperity, it is

certain that his voice was as soft as it was possible to make it when

his wife returned.

“Jeanne, my dear,” he said, “do not be angry with me; give me your hand.

One never knows how to trust you women. I return, bringing you fresh

honors and more wealth, and yet, tete-Dieu! you receive me like an

enemy. My new government will oblige me to make long absences until I

can exchange it for that of Lower Normandy; and I request, my dear, that

you will show me a pleasant face while I am here.”

The countess understood the meaning of the words, the feigned softness

of which could no longer deceive her.

“I know my duty,” she replied in a tone of sadness which the count

mistook for tenderness.

The timid creature had too much purity and dignity to try, as some

clever women would have done, to govern the count by putting calculation

into her conduct,--a sort of prostitution by which noble souls feel

degraded. Silently she turned away, to console her despair with Etienne.

“Tete-Dieu! shall I never be loved?” cried the count, seeing the tears

in his wife’s eyes as she left the room.

Thus incessantly threatened, motherhood became to the poor woman a

passion which assumed the intensity that women put into their guilty

affections. By a species of occult communion, the secret of which is in

the hearts of mothers, the child comprehended the peril that threatened

him and dreaded the approach of his father. The terrible scene of which

he had been a witness remained in his memory, and affected him like an

illness; at the sound of the count’s step his features contracted, and

the mother’s ear was not so alert as the instinct of her child. As he

grew older this faculty created by terror increased, until, like the

savages of America, Etienne could distinguish his father’s step and hear

his voice at immense distances. To witness the terror with which the

count inspired her thus shared by her child made Etienne the more

precious to the countess; their union was so strengthened that like two

flowers on one twig they bent to the same wind, and lifted their heads

with the same hope. In short, they were one life.

When the count again left home Jeanne was pregnant. This time she gave

birth in due season, and not without great suffering, to a stout boy,

who soon became the living image of his father, so that the hatred of

the count for his first-born was increased by this event. To save her

cherished child the countess agreed to all the plans which her husband

formed for the happiness and wealth of his second son, whom he named

Maximilien. Etienne was to be made a priest, in order to leave the

property and titles of the house of Herouville to his younger brother.

At that cost the poor mother believed she ensured the safety of her

hated child.

No two brothers were ever more unlike than Etienne and Maximilien. The

younger’s taste was all for noise, violent exercises, and war, and

the count felt for him the same excessive love that his wife felt for

Etienne. By a tacit compact each parent took charge of the child of

their heart. The duke (for about this time Henri IV. rewarded the

services of the Seigneur d’Herouville with a dukedom), not wishing, he

said, to fatigue his wife, gave the nursing of the youngest boy to

a stout peasant-woman chosen by Beauvouloir, and announced his

determination to bring up the child in his own manner. He gave him,

as time went on, a holy horror of books and study; taught him the

mechanical knowledge required by a military career, made him a good

rider, a good shot with an arquebuse, and skilful with his dagger. When

the boy was big enough he took him to hunt, and let him acquire the

savage language, the rough manners, the bodily strength, and the

vivacity of look and speech which to his mind were the attributes of an

accomplished man. The boy became, by the time he was twelve years old,

a lion-cub ill-trained, as formidable in his way as the father himself,

having free rein to tyrannize over every one, and using the privilege.

Etienne lived in the little house, or lodge, near the sea, given to him

by his father, and fitted up by the duchess with some of the comforts

and enjoyments to which he had a right. She herself spent the greater

part of her time there. Together the mother and child roamed over the

rocks and the shore, keeping strictly within the limits of the boy’s

domain of beach and shells, of moss and pebbles. The boy’s terror of his

father was so great that, like the Lapp, who lives and dies in his snow,

he made a native land of his rocks and his cottage, and was terrified

and uneasy if he passed his frontier.

The duchess, knowing her child was not fitted to find happiness except

in some humble and retired sphere, did not regret the fate that was thus

imposed upon him; she used this enforced vocation to prepare him for a

noble life of study and science, and she brought to the chateau Pierre

de Sebonde as tutor to the future priest. Nevertheless, in spite of

the tonsure imposed by the will of the father, she was determined that

Etienne’s education should not be wholly ecclesiastical, and took pains

to secularize it. She employed Beauvouloir to teach him the mysteries of

natural science; she herself superintended his studies, regulating them

according to her child’s strength, and enlivening them by teaching him

Italian, and revealing to him little by little the poetic beauties of

that language. While the duke rode off with Maximilien to the forest and

the wild-boars at the risk of his life, Jeanne wandered with Etienne

in the milky way of Petrarch’s sonnets, or the mighty labyrinth of the

Divina Comedia. Nature had endowed the youth, in compensation for his

infirmities, with so melodious a voice that to hear him sing was

a constant delight; his mother taught him music, and their tender,

melancholy songs, accompanied by a mandolin, were the favorite

recreation promised as a reward for some more arduous study required by

the Abbe de Sebonde. Etienne listened to his mother with a passionate

admiration she had never seen except in the eyes of Georges de Chaverny.

The first time the poor woman found a memory of her girlhood in the

long, slow look of her child, she covered him with kisses; and she

blushed when Etienne asked her why she seemed to love him better at that

moment than ever before. She answered that every hour made him dearer

to her. She found in the training of his soul, and in the culture of

his mind, pleasures akin to those she had tasted in feeding him with her

milk. She put all her pride and self-love into making him superior

to herself, and not in ruling him. Hearts without tenderness covet

dominion, but a true love treasures abnegation, that virtue of strength.

When Etienne could not at first comprehend a demonstration, a theme, a

theory, the poor mother, who was present at the lessons, seemed to

long to infuse knowledge, as formerly she had given nourishment at the

child’s least cry. And then, what joy suffused her eyes when Etienne’s

mind seized the true sense of things and appropriated it. She proved, as

Pierre de Sebonde said, that a mother is a dual being whose sensations

cover two existences.

“Ah, if some woman as loving as I could infuse into him hereafter the

life of love, how happy he might be!” she often thought.

But the fatal interests which consigned Etienne to the priesthood

returned to her mind, and she kissed the hair that the scissors of the

Church were to shear, leaving her tears upon them. Still, in spite of

the unjust compact she had made with the duke, she could not see Etienne

in her visions of the future as priest or cardinal; and the absolute

forgetfulness of the father as to his first-born, enabled her to

postpone the moment of putting him into Holy Orders.

“There is time enough,” she said to herself.

The day came when all her cares, inspired by a sentiment which seemed

to enter into the flesh of her son and give it life, had their reward.

Beauvouloir--that blessed man whose teachings had proved so precious to

the child, and whose anxious glance at that frail idol had so often made

the duchess tremble--declared that Etienne was now in a condition

to live long years, provided no violent emotion came to convulse his

delicate body. Etienne was then sixteen.

At that age he was just five feet, a height he never passed. His skin,

as transparent and satiny as that of a little girl, showed a delicate

tracery of blue veins; its whiteness was that of porcelain. His eyes,

which were light blue and ineffably gentle, implored the protection of

men and women; that beseeching look fascinated before the melody of

his voice was heard to complete the charm. True modesty was in every

feature. Long chestnut hair, smooth and very fine, was parted in the

middle of his head into two bandeaus which curled at their extremity.

His pale and hollow cheeks, his pure brow, lined with a few furrows,

expressed a condition of suffering which was painful to witness. His

mouth, always gracious, and adorned with very white teeth, wore the sort

of fixed smile which we often see on the lips of the dying. His hands,

white as those of a woman, were remarkably handsome. The habit of

meditation had taught him to droop his head like a fragile flower, and

the attitude was in keeping with his person; it was like the last grace

that a great artist touches into a portrait to bring out its latent

thought. Etienne’s head was that of a delicate girl placed upon the

weakly and deformed body of a man.

Poesy, the rich meditations of which make us roam like botanists through

the vast fields of thought, the fruitful comparison of human ideas, the

enthusiasm given by a clear conception of works of genius, came to be

the inexhaustible and tranquil joys of the young man’s solitary and

dreamy life. Flowers, ravishing creatures whose destiny resembled his

own, were his loves. Happy to see in her son the innocent passions which

took the place of the rough contact with social life which he never

could have borne, the duchess encouraged Etienne’s tastes; she brought

him Spanish “romanceros,” Italian “motets,” books, sonnets, poems. The

library of Cardinal d’Herouville came into Etienne’s possession, the

use of which filled his life. These readings, which his fragile health

forbade him to continue for many hours at a time, and his rambles among

the rocks of his domain, were interspersed with naive meditations which

kept him motionless for hours together before his smiling flowers--those

sweet companions!--or crouching in a niche of the rocks before some

species of algae, a moss, a seaweed, studying their mysteries; seeking

perhaps a rhythm in their fragrant depths, like a bee its honey. He

often admired, without purpose, and without explaining his pleasure to

himself, the slender lines on the petals of dark flowers, the delicacy

of their rich tunics of gold or purple, green or azure, the fringes, so

profusely beautiful, of their calyxes or leaves, their ivory or velvet

textures. Later, a thinker as well as a poet, he would detect the reason

of these innumerable differences in a single nature, by discovering the

indication of unknown faculties; for from day to day he made progress

in the interpretation of the Divine Word writing upon all things here

below.

These constant and secret researches into matters occult gave to

Etienne’s life the apparent somnolence of meditative genius. He would

spend long days lying upon the shore, happy, a poet, all-unconscious of

the fact. The sudden irruption of a gilded insect, the shimmering of the

sun upon the ocean, the tremulous motion of the vast and limpid mirror

of the waters, a shell, a crab, all was event and pleasure to that

ingenuous young soul. And then to see his mother coming towards him,

to hear from afar the rustle of her gown, to await her, to kiss her, to

talk to her, to listen to her gave him such keen emotions that often a

slight delay, a trifling fear would throw him into a violent fever. In

him there was nought but soul, and in order that the weak, debilitated

body should not be destroyed by the keen emotions of that soul, Etienne

needed silence, caresses, peace in the landscape, and the love of

a woman. For the time being, his mother gave him the love and the

caresses; flowers and books entranced his solitude; his little kingdom

of sand and shells, algae and verdure seemed to him a universe, ever

fresh and new.

Etienne imbibed all the benefits of this physical and absolutely

innocent life, this mental and moral life so poetically extended.

A child by form, a man in mind, he was equally angelic under either

aspect. By his mother’s influence his studies had removed his emotions

to the region of ideas. The action of his life took place, therefore,

in the moral world, far from the social world which would either

have killed him or made him suffer. He lived by his soul and by his

intellect. Laying hold of human thought by reading, he rose to thoughts

that stirred in matter; he felt the thoughts of the air, he read the

thoughts on the skies. Early he mounted that ethereal summit where alone

he found the delicate nourishment that his soul needed; intoxicating

food! which predestined him to sorrow whenever to these accumulated

treasures should be added the riches of a passion rising suddenly in his

heart.

If, at times, Jeanne de Saint-Savin dreaded that coming storm, he

consoled herself with a thought which the otherwise sad vocation of

her son put into her mind,--for the poor mother found no remedy for his

sorrows except some lesser sorrow.

“He will be a cardinal,” she thought; “he will live in the sentiment

of Art, of which he will make himself the protector. He will love Art

instead of loving a woman, and Art will not betray him.”

The pleasures of this tender motherhood were incessantly held in check

by sad reflections, born of the strange position in which Etienne was

placed. The brothers had passed the adolescent age without knowing each

other, without so much as even suspecting their rival existence. The

duchess had long hoped for an opportunity, during the absence of her

husband, to bind the two brothers to each other in some solemn scene by

which she might enfold them both in her love. This hope, long cherished,

had now faded. Far from wishing to bring about an intercourse between

the brothers, she feared an encounter between them, even more than

between the father and son. Maximilien, who believed in evil only,

might have feared that Etienne would some day claim his rights, and, so

fearing, might have flung him into the sea with a stone around his neck.

No son had ever less respect for a mother than he. As soon as he could

reason he had seen the low esteem in which the duke held his wife. If

the old man still retained some forms of decency in his manners to the

duchess, Maximilien, unrestrained by his father, caused his mother many

a grief.

Consequently, Bertrand was incessantly on the watch to prevent

Maximilien from seeing Etienne, whose existence was carefully concealed.

All the attendants of the castle cordially hated the Marquis de

Saint-Sever (the name and title borne by the younger brother), and those

who knew of the existence of the elder looked upon him as an avenger

whom God was holding in reserve.

Etienne’s future was therefore doubtful; he might even be persecuted

by his own brother! The poor duchess had no relations to whom she could

confide the life and interests of her cherished child. Would he not

blame her when in his violet robes he longed to be a father as she had

been a mother? These thoughts, and her melancholy life so full of secret

sorrows were like a mortal illness kept at bay for a time by remedies.

Her heart needed the wisest management, and those about her were cruelly

inexpert in gentleness. What mother’s heart would not have been torn

at the sight of her eldest son, a man of mind and soul in whom a noble

genius made itself felt, deprived of his rights, while the younger, hard

and brutal, without talent, even military talent, was chosen to wear

the ducal coronet and perpetuate the family? The house of Herouville

was discarding its own glory. Incapable of anger the gentle Jeanne de

Saint-Savin could only bless and weep, but often she raised her eyes to

heaven, asking it to account for this singular doom. Those eyes filled

with tears when she thought that at her death her cherished child would

be wholly orphaned and left exposed to the brutalities of a brother

without faith or conscience.

Such emotions repressed, a first love unforgotten, so many sorrows

ignored and hidden within her,--for she kept her keenest sufferings from

her cherished child,--her joys embittered, her griefs unrelieved, all

these shocks had weakened the springs of life and were developing in her

system a slow consumption which day by day was gathering greater force.

A last blow hastened it. She tried to warn the duke as to the results of

Maximilien’s education, and was repulsed; she saw that she could give no

remedy to the shocking seeds which were germinating in the soul of her

second child. From this moment began a period of decline which soon

became so visible as to bring about the appointment of Beauvouloir to

the post of physician to the house of Herouville and the government of

Normandy.

The former bonesetter came to live at the castle. In those days such

posts belonged to learned men, who thus gained a living and the leisure

necessary for a studious life and the accomplishment of scientific

work. Beauvouloir had for some time desired the situation, because his

knowledge and his fortune had won him numerous bitter enemies. In spite

of the protection of a great family to whom he had done great services,

he had recently been implicated in a criminal case, and the intervention

of the Governor of Normandy, obtained by the duchess, had alone saved

him from being brought to trial. The duke had no reason to repent this

protection given to the old bonesetter. Beauvouloir saved the life of

the Marquis de Saint-Sever in so dangerous an illness that any other

physician would have failed in doing so. But the wounds of the duchess

were too deep-seated and dated too far back to be cured, especially as

they were constantly kept open in her home. When her sufferings warned

this angel of many sorrows that her end was approaching, death was

hastened by the gloomy apprehensions that filled her mind as to the

future.

“What will become of my poor child without me?” was a thought renewed

every hour like a bitter tide.

Obliged at last to keep her bed, the duchess failed rapidly, for she was

then unable to see her son, forbidden as he was by her compact with his

father to approach the house. The sorrow of the youth was equal to that

of the mother. Inspired by the genius of repressed feeling, Etienne

created a mystical language by which to communicate with his mother. He

studied the resources of his voice like an opera-singer, and often he

came beneath her windows to let her hear his melodiously melancholy

voice, when Beauvouloir by a sign informed him she was alone. Formerly,

as a babe, he had consoled his mother with his smiles, now, become a

poet, he caressed her with his melodies.

“Those songs give me life,” said the duchess to Beauvouloir, inhaling

the air that Etienne’s voice made living.

At length the day came when the poor son’s mourning began. Already he

had felt the mysterious correspondences between his emotions and the

movements of the ocean. The divining of the thoughts of matter, a power

with which his occult knowledge had invested him, made this phenomenon

more eloquent to him than to all others. During the fatal night when he

was taken to see his mother for the last time, the ocean was agitated by

movements that to him were full of meaning. The heaving waters seemed to

show that the sea was working intestinally; the swelling waves rolled in

and spent themselves with lugubrious noises like the howling of a dog in

distress. Unconsciously, Etienne found himself saying:--

“What does it want of me? It quivers and moans like a living creature.

My mother has often told me that the ocean was in horrible convulsions

on the night when I was born. Something is about to happen to me.”

This thought kept him standing before his window with his eyes sometimes

on his mother’s windows where a faint light trembled, sometimes on the

ocean which continued to moan. Suddenly Beauvouloir knocked on the door

of his room, opened it, and showed on his saddened face the reflection

of some new misfortune.

“Monseigneur,” he said, “Madame la duchesse is in so sad a state that

she wishes to see you. All precautions are taken that no harm shall

happen to you in the castle; but we must be prudent; to see her you will

have to pass through the room of Monseigneur the duke, the room where

you were born.”

These words brought the tears to Etienne’s eyes, and he said:--

“The Ocean _did_ speak to me!”

Mechanically he allowed himself to be led towards the door of the tower

which gave entrance to the private way leading to the duchess’s room.

Bertrand was awaiting him, lantern in hand. Etienne reached the library

of the Cardinal d’Herouville, and there he was made to wait with

Beauvouloir while Bertrand went on to unlock the other doors, and make

sure that the hated son could pass through his father’s house without

danger. The duke did not awake. Advancing with light steps, Etienne and

Beauvouloir heard in that immense chateau no sound but the plaintive

groans of the dying woman. Thus the very circumstances attending the

birth of Etienne were renewed at the death of his mother. The same

tempest, same agony, same dread of awaking the pitiless giant, who,

on this occasion at least, slept soundly. Bertrand, as a further

precaution, took Etienne in his arms and carried him through the duke’s

room, intending to give some excuse as to the state of the duchess if

the duke awoke and detected him. Etienne’s heart was horribly wrung by

the same fears which filled the minds of these faithful servants; but

this emotion prepared him, in a measure, for the sight that met his eyes

in that signorial room, which he had never re-entered since the fatal

day when, as a child, the paternal curse had driven him from it.

On the great bed, where happiness never came, he looked for his beloved,

and scarcely found her, so emaciated was she. White as her own laces,

with scarcely a breath left, she gathered up all her strength to clasp

Etienne’s hand, and to give him her whole soul, as heretofore, in a

look. Chaverny had bequeathed to her all his life in a last farewell.

Beauvouloir and Bertrand, the mother and the sleeping duke were all

once more assembled. Same place, same scene, same actors! but this was

funereal grief in place of the joys of motherhood; the night of death

instead of the dawn of life. At that moment the storm, threatened by the

melancholy moaning of the sea since sundown, suddenly burst forth.

“Dear flower of my life!” said the mother, kissing her son. “You were

taken from my bosom in the midst of a tempest, and in a tempest I am

taken from you. Between these storms all life has been stormy to me,

except the hours I have spent with you. This is my last joy, mingled

with my last pangs. Adieu, my only love! adieu, dear image of two souls

that will soon be reunited! Adieu, my only joy--pure joy! adieu, my own

beloved!”

“Let me follow thee!” cried Etienne.

“It would be your better fate!” she said, two tears rolling down her

livid cheeks; for, as in former days, her eyes seemed to read the

future. “Did any one see him?” she asked of the two men.

At this instant the duke turned in his bed; they all trembled.

“Even my last joy is mingled with pain,” murmured the duchess. “Take him

away! take him away!”

“Mother, I would rather see you a moment longer and die!” said the poor

lad, as he fainted by her side.

At a sign from the duchess, Bertrand took Etienne in his arms, and,

showing him for the last time to his mother, who kissed him with a last

look, he turned to carry him away, awaiting the final order of the dying

mother.

“Love him well!” she said to the physician and Bertrand; “he has no

protectors but you and Heaven.”

Prompted by an instinct which never misleads a mother, she had felt the

pity of the old retainer for the eldest son of a house, for which his

veneration was only comparable to that of the Jews for their Holy City,

Jerusalem. As for Beauvouloir, the compact between himself and the

duchess had long been signed. The two servitors, deeply moved to

see their mistress forced to bequeath her noble child to none but

themselves, promised by a solemn gesture to be the providence of their

young master, and the mother had faith in that gesture.

The duchess died towards morning, mourned by the servants of the

household, who, for all comment, were heard to say beside her grave,

“She was a comely woman, sent from Paradise.”

Etienne’s sorrow was the most intense, the most lasting of sorrows, and

wholly silent. He wandered no more among his rocks; he felt no strength

to read or sing. He spent whole days crouched in the crevice of a rock,

caring nought for the inclemency of the weather, motionless, fastened to

the granite like the lichen that grew upon it; weeping seldom, lost in

one sole thought, immense, infinite as the ocean, and, like that ocean,

taking a thousand forms,--terrible, tempestuous, tender, calm. It

was more than sorrow; it was a new existence, an irrevocable destiny,

dooming this innocent creature to smile no more. There are pangs which,

like a drop of blood cast into flowing water, stain the whole current

instantly. The stream, renewed from its source, restores the purity of

its surface; but with Etienne the source itself was polluted, and each

new current brought its own gall.

Bertrand, in his old age, had retained the superintendence of the

stables, so as not to lose the habit of authority in the household. His

house was not far from that of Etienne, so that he was ever at hand to

watch over the youth with the persistent affection and simple wiliness

characteristic of old soldiers. He checked his roughness when speaking

to the poor lad; softly he walked in rainy weather to fetch him from his

reverie in his crevice to the house. He put his pride into filling the

mother’s place, so that her child might find, if not her love, at least

the same attentions. This pity resembled tenderness. Etienne bore,

without complaint or resistance, these attentions of the old retainer,

but too many links were now broken between the hated child and other

creatures to admit of any keen affection at present in his heart.

Mechanically he allowed himself to be protected; he became, as it were,

an intermediary creature between man and plant, or, perhaps one might

say, between man and God. To what shall we compare a being to whom all

social laws, all the false sentiments of the world were unknown, and who

kept his ravishing innocence by obeying nought but the instincts of his

heart?

Nevertheless, in spite of his sombre melancholy, he came to feel the

need of loving, of finding another mother, another soul for his soul.

But, separated from civilization by an iron wall, it was well-nigh

impossible to meet with a being who had flowered like himself.

Instinctively seeking another self to whom to confide his thoughts and

whose life might blend with his life, he ended in sympathizing with

his Ocean. The sea became to him a living, thinking being. Always in

presence of that vast creation, the hidden marvels of which contrast

so grandly with those of earth, he discovered the meaning of many

mysteries. Familiar from his cradle with the infinitude of those liquid

fields, the sea and the sky taught him many poems. To him, all was

variety in that vast picture so monotonous to some. Like other men whose

souls dominate their bodies, he had a piercing sight which could

reach to enormous distances and seize, with admirable ease and without

fatigue, the fleeting tints of the clouds, the passing shimmer of the

waters. On days of perfect stillness his eyes could see the manifold

tints of the ocean, which to him, like the face of a woman, had its

physiognomy, its smiles, ideas, caprices; there green and sombre; here

smiling and azure; sometimes uniting its brilliant lines with the

hazy gleams of the horizon, or again, softly swaying beneath the

orange-tinted heavens. For him all-glorious fetes were celebrated at

sundown when the star of day poured its red colors on the waves in a

crimson flood. For him the sea was gay and sparkling and spirited when

it quivered in repeating the noonday light from a thousand dazzling

facets; to him it revealed its wondrous melancholy; it made him weep

whenever, calm or sad, it reflected the dun-gray sky surcharged with

clouds. He had learned the mute language of that vast creation. The flux

and reflux of its waters were to him a melodious breathing which uttered

in his ear a sentiment; he felt and comprehended its inward meaning.

No mariner, no man of science, could have predicted better than he the

slightest wrath of the ocean, the faintest change on that vast face. By

the manner of the waves as they rose and died away upon the shore, he

could foresee tempests, surges, squalls, the height of tides, or calms.

When night had spread its veil upon the sky, he still could see the sea

in its twilight mystery, and talk with it. At all times he shared

its fecund life, feeling in his soul the tempest when it was angry;

breathing its rage in its hissing breath; running with its waves as

they broke in a thousand liquid fringes upon the rocks. He felt himself

intrepid, free, and terrible as the sea itself; like it, he bounded and

fell back; he kept its solemn silence; he copied its sudden pause. In

short, he had wedded the sea; it was now his confidant, his friend. In

the morning when he crossed the glowing sands of the beach and came upon

his rocks, he divined the temper of the ocean from a single glance; he

could see landscapes on its surface; he hovered above the face of

the waters, like an angel coming down from heaven. When the joyous,

mischievous white mists cast their gossamer before him, like a veil

before the face of a bride, he followed their undulations and caprices

with the joy of a lover. His thought, married with that grand expression

of the divine thought, consoled him in his solitude, and the thousand

outlooks of his soul peopled its desert with glorious fantasies. He

ended at last by divining in the motions of the sea its close communion

with the celestial system; he perceived nature in its harmonious whole,

from the blade of grass to the wandering stars which seek, like seeds

driven by the wind, to plant themselves in ether.

Pure as an angel, virgin of those ideas which degrade mankind, naive as

a child, he lived like a sea-bird, a gull, or a flower, prodigal of the

treasures of poetic imagination, and possessed of a divine knowledge,

the fruitful extent of which he contemplated in solitude. Incredible

mingling of two creations! sometimes he rose to God in prayer; sometimes

he descended, humble and resigned, to the quiet happiness of animals. To

him the stars were the flowers of night, the birds his friends, the sun

was a father. Everywhere he found the soul of his mother; often he saw

her in the clouds; he spoke to her; they communicated, veritably, by

celestial visions; on certain days he could hear her voice and see her

smile; in short, there were days when he had not lost her. God seemed to

have given him the power of the hermits of old, to have endowed him

with some perfected inner senses which penetrated to the spirit of all

things. Unknown moral forces enabled him to go farther than other men

into the secrets of the Immortal labor. His yearnings, his sorrows were

the links that united him to the unseen world; he went there, armed with

his love, to seek his mother; realizing thus, with the sublime harmonies

of ecstasy, the symbolic enterprise of Orpheus.

Often, when crouching in the crevice of some rock, capriciously curled

up in his granite grotto, the entrance to which was as narrow as that of

a charcoal kiln, he would sink into involuntary sleep, his figure softly

lighted by the warm rays of the sun which crept through the fissures and

fell upon the dainty seaweeds that adorned his retreat, the veritable

nest of a sea-bird. The sun, his sovereign lord, alone told him that

he had slept, by measuring the time he had been absent from his watery

landscapes, his golden sands, his shells and pebbles. Across a light

as brilliant as that from heaven he saw the cities of which he read; he

looked with amazement, but without envy, at courts and kings, battles,

men, and buildings. These daylight dreams made dearer to him his

precious flowers, his clouds, his sun, his granite rocks. To attach him

the more to his solitary existence, an angel seemed to reveal to him the

abysses of the moral world and the terrible shocks of civilization. He

felt that his soul, if torn by the throng of men, would perish like a

pearl dropped from the crown of a princess into mud.

PART II. HOW THE SON DIED