gave herself up entirely to her motherly love, seeking
in it all her joys in exchange for the social pleasures to which she bid
farewell. She lived by work, saving up a treasure for her son. And,
in after years, a day, an hour repaid her amply for the long and weary
sacrifices of her indigence.

At the last exhibition her son had received the Cross of the Legion of
Honor. The newspapers, unanimous in hailing an unknown genius, still
rang with sincere praises. Artists themselves acknowledged Schinner as
a master, and dealers covered his canvases with gold pieces. At
five-and-twenty Hippolyte Schinner, to whom his mother had transmitted
her woman's soul, understood more clearly than ever his position in the
world. Anxious to restore to his mother the pleasures of which society
had so long robbed her, he lived for her, hoping by the aid of fame and
fortune to see her one day happy, rich, respected, and surrounded by
men of mark. Schinner had therefore chosen his friends among the most
honorable and distinguished men. Fastidious in the selection of his
intimates, he desired to raise still further a position which his talent
had placed high. The work to which he had devoted himself from
boyhood, by compelling him to dwell in solitude--the mother of great
thoughts--had left him the beautiful beliefs which grace the early
days of life. His adolescent soul was not closed to any of the thousand
bashful emotions by which a young man is a being apart, whose heart
abounds in joys, in poetry, in virginal hopes, puerile in the eyes of
men of the world, but deep because they are single-hearted.

He was endowed with the gentle and polite manners which speak to the
soul, and fascinate even those who do not understand them. He was well
made. His voice, coming from his heart, stirred that of others to
noble sentiments, and bore witness to his true modesty by a certain
ingenuousness of tone. Those who saw him felt drawn to him by that
attraction of the moral nature which men of science are happily unable
to analyze; they would detect in it some phenomenon of galvanism, or
the current of I know not what fluid, and express our sentiments in a
formula of ratios of oxygen and electricity.

These details will perhaps explain to strong-minded persons and to men
of fashion why, in the absence of the porter whom he had sent to the end
of the Rue de la Madeleine to call him a coach, Hippolyte Schinner did
not ask the man's wife any questions con