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