“My dear friend, if it will not weary you, I can give you some very strange particulars about my life.  I know that you are a sensible man, so I do not fear that our friendship will suffer by my revelations, and should it suffer, I should not care about having you for my friend any longer.

“My mother, Madame de Courcils, was a poor little timid woman, whom her husband had married for the sake of her fortune, and her whole life was one of martyrdom.  Of a loving, delicate mind, she was constantly being ill-treated by the man who ought to have been my father, one of those bores called country gentleman.  A month after their marriage he was living with a servant, and besides that, the wives and daughters of his tenants were his mistresses, which did not prevent him from having three children by his wife, or three, if you count me in.  My mother said nothing, and lived in that noisy house like a little mouse.  Set aside, disparaged, nervous, she looked at people with her bright, uneasy, restless eyes, the eyes of some terrified creature which can never shake off its fear.  And yet she was pretty, very pretty and fair, a gray-blonde, as if her hair had lost its color through her constant fears.

“Among Monsieur de Courcil’s friends who constantly came to the chateau, there was an ex-cavalry officer, a widower, a man who was feared, who was at the same time tender and violent, capable of the most energetic resolutions, Monsieur de Bourneval, whose name I bear.  He was a tall, thin man, with a heavy black moustache, and I am very like him.  He was a man who had read a great deal, and whose ideas were not like those of most of his class.  His great-grandmother had been a friend of J.J.  Rousseau’s, and one might have said that he had inherited something of this ancestral connection.  He knew the Contrat Social, and the Nouvelle Heloise by heart, and all those philosophical books which long beforehand prepared the overthrow of our old usages, prejudices, superannuated laws and imbecile morality.

“It seems that he loved my mother, and she loved him, but their intrigue was carried on so secretly, that no one guessed it.  The poor, neglected, unhappy woman, must have clung to him in a despairing manner, and in her intimacy with him must have imbibed all his ways of thinking, theories of free thought, audacious ideas of independent love; but as she was so timid that she never ventured to speak aloud, it was all driven back, condensed and expressed in her heart, which never opened itself.

“My two brothers were very hard towards her, like their father was, and never gave her a caress, and, used to seeing her count for nothing in the house, they treated her rather like a servant, and so I was the only one of her sons who really loved her, and whom she loved.

“When she died, I was seventeen, and I must add, in order that you may understand what follows, that there had been a law suit between my father and my mother, and that their property had been separated, to my mother’s advantage, as, thanks to the tricks of the law, and the intelligent devotion of a lawyer to her interests, she had preserved the right of making her will in favor of anyone she pleased.