a sea-bird, a gull, or a flower, prodigal of the
treasures of poetic imagination, and possessed of a divine knowledge,
the fruitful extent of which he contemplated in solitude. Incredible
mingling of two creations! sometimes he rose to God in prayer; sometimes
he descended, humble and resigned, to the quiet happiness of animals. To
him the stars were the flowers of night, the birds his friends, the sun
was a father. Everywhere he found the soul of his mother; often he saw
her in the clouds; he spoke to her; they communicated, veritably, by
celestial visions; on certain days he could hear her voice and see her
smile; in short, there were days when he had not lost her. God seemed to
have given him the power of the hermits of old, to have endowed him
with some perfected inner senses which penetrated to the spirit of all
things. Unknown moral forces enabled him to go farther than other men
into the secrets of the Immortal labor. His yearnings, his sorrows were
the links that united him to the unseen world; he went there, armed with
his love, to seek his mother; realizing thus, with the sublime harmonies
of ecstasy, the symbolic enterprise of Orpheus.

Often, when crouching in the crevice of some rock, capriciously curled
up in his granite grotto, the entrance to which was as narrow as that of
a charcoal kiln, he would sink into involuntary sleep, his figure softly
lighted by the warm rays of the sun which crept through the fissures and
fell upon the dainty seaweeds that adorned his retreat, the veritable
nest of a sea-bird. The sun, his sovereign lord, alone told him that
he had slept, by measuring the time he had been absent from his watery
landscapes, his golden sands, his shells and pebbles. Across a light
as brilliant as that from heaven he saw the cities of which he read; he
looked with amazement, but without envy, at courts and kings, battles,
men, and buildings. These daylight dreams made dearer to him his
precious flowers, his clouds, his sun, his granite rocks. To attach him
the more to his solitary existence, an angel seemed to reveal to him the
abysses of the moral world and the terrible shocks of civilization. He
felt that his soul, if torn by the throng of men, would perish like a
pearl dropped from the crown of a princess into mud.

PART II. HOW THE SON DIED

CHAPTER IV. THE HEIR

In 1617, twenty and some years after the horrible night during which
Etienne came into the world, the Duc d'Hero