us, 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 pale
blonde, as if her hair had lost its color through her constant fear.

"Among the friends of Monsieur de Courcils who constantly came to her
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
determined resolves, Monsieur de Bourneval, whose name I bear. He was a
tall, thin man, with a heavy black mustache. I am very like him. He was a
man who had read a great deal, and his 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 prepared in
advance 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 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 t