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