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.