“It seems that he loved my mother, and she loved him, but their liaison was carried on so secretly that no one guessed at its existence.  The poor, neglected, unhappy woman must have clung to him in despair, and in her intimacy with him must have imbibed all his ways of thinking, theories of free thought, audacious ideas of independent love; but being so timid she never ventured to speak out, and it was all driven back, condensed, shut up in her heart.

“My two brothers were very hard towards her, like their father, and never gave her a caress, and, accustomed to seeing her count for nothing in the house, they treated her rather like a servant.  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 a lawsuit between my father and mother had been decided in my mother’s favor, giving her the bulk of the property, and, thanks to the tricks of the law, and the intelligent devotion of a lawyer to her interests, the right to make her will in favor of whom she pleased.

“We were told that there was a will at the lawyer’s office and were invited to be present at the reading of it.  I can remember it, as if it were yesterday.  It was an imposing scene, dramatic, burlesque and surprising, occasioned by the posthumous revolt of that dead woman, by the cry for liberty, by the demands of that martyred one who had been crushed by our oppression during her lifetime and who, from her closed tomb, uttered a despairing appeal for independence.

“The man who believed he was my father, a stout, ruddy-faced man, who looked like a butcher, and my brothers, two great fellows of twenty and twenty-two, were waiting quietly in their chairs.  Monsieur de Bourneval, who had been invited to be present, came in and stood behind me.  He was very pale and bit his mustache, which was turning gray.  No doubt he was prepared for what was going to happen.  The lawyer double-locked the door and began to read the will, after having opened, in our presence, the envelope, sealed with red wax, of the contents of which he was ignorant.”

My friend stopped talking abruptly, and rising, took from his writing-table an old paper, unfolded it, kissed it and then continued:  “This is the will of my beloved mother: 

   “’I, the undersigned, Anne Catherine-Genevieve-Mathilde de
   Croixluce, the legitimate wife of Leopold-Joseph Gontran de Councils
   sound in body and mind, here express my last wishes.

“I first of all ask God, and then my dear son Rene to pardon me for the act I am about to commit.  I believe that my child’s heart is great enough to understand me, and to forgive me.  I have suffered my whole life long.  I was married out of calculation, then despised, misunderstood, oppressed and constantly deceived by my husband.

   “’I forgive him, but I owe him nothing.