When the days of a high and mighty seigneur are numbered, the physician becomes a personage of importance in the household.  It is, therefore, not surprising to see a former bonesetter so familiar with the Duc d’Herouville.  Apart from the illegitimate ties which connected him, by marriage, to this great family and certainly militated in his favor, his sound good sense had so often been proved by the duke that the old man had now become his master’s most valued counsellor.  Beauvouloir was the Coyctier of this Louis XI.  Nevertheless, and no matter how valuable his knowledge might be, he never obtained over the government of Normandy, in whom was the ferocity of religious warfare, as much influence as feudality exercised over that rugged nature.  For this reason the physician was confident that the prejudices of the noble would thwart the desires and the vows of the father.

CHAPTER V

Gabrielle

Great physician that he was, Beauvouloir saw plainly that to a being so delicately organized as Etienne marriage must come as a slow and gentle inspiration, communicating new powers to his being and vivifying it with the fires of love.  As he had said to the father, to impose a wife on Etienne would be to kill him.  Above all it was important that the young recluse should not be alarmed at the thought of marriage, of which he knew nothing, or be made aware of the object of his father’s wishes.  This unknown poet conceived as yet only the beautiful and noble passion of Petrarch for Laura, of Dante for Beatrice.  Like his mother he was all pure love and soul; the opportunity to love must be given to him, and then the event should be awaited, not compelled.  A command to love would have dried within him the very sources of his life.

Maitre Antoine Beauvouloir was a father; he had a daughter brought up under conditions which made her the wife for Etienne.  It was so difficult to foresee the events which would make a son, disowned by his father and destined to the priesthood, the presumptive heir of the house of Herouville that Beauvouloir had never until now noticed the resemblance between the fate of Etienne and that of Gabrielle.  A sudden idea which now came to him was inspired more by his devotion to those two beings than by ambition.

His wife, in spite of his great skill, had died in child-bed leaving him a daughter whose health was so frail that it seemed as if the mother had bequeathed to her fruit the germs of death.  Beauvouloir loved his Gabrielle as old men love their only child.  His science and his incessant care had given factitious life to this frail creature, which he cultivated as a florist cultivates an exotic plant.  He had kept her hidden from all eyes on his estate of Forcalier, where she was protected against the dangers of the time by the general good-will felt for a man to whom all owed gratitude, and whose scientific powers inspired in the ignorant minds of the country-people a superstitious awe.