aken there; the painter had in his wife's brother a friend of
self-sacrificing devotion. He could exact anything of the Mameluke, or,
rather, of that slave, for it was the blood of the slaves, of his
ancestors, which manifested itself in Chapron by so total an absorption
of his personality. The atavism of servitude has these two effects which
are apparently contradictory: it produces fathomless capacities of
sacrifice or of perfidy. Both of these qualities were embodied in the
brother and in the sister. As happens, sometimes, the two characteristics
of their race were divided between them; one had inherited all the virtue
of self-sacrifice, the other all the puissance of hypocrisy.

But the drama called forth by Madame Steno's infidelity, and finally by
Gorka's rashness, would only expose to light the moral conditions which
Dorsenne had foreseen without comprehending. He was completely ignorant
of the circumstances under which Florent had developed, of those under
which Maitland and he had met, of how Maitland had decided to marry
Lydia; finally an exceptional and lengthy history which it is necessary
to sketch here at least, in order to render clear the singular relations
of those three beings.

As we have seen, the allusion coarsely made by Boleslas to negro blood
marked the moment when Florent lost all self-control, to the point even
of raising his cane to his insolent interlocutor. That blemish, hidden
with the most jealous care, represented to the young man what it had
represented to his father, the vital point of self-love, secret and
constant humiliation. It was very faint, the trace of negro blood which
flowed in their veins, so faint that it was necessary to be told of it,
but it was sufficient to render a stay in America so much the more
intolerable to both, as they had inherited all the pride of their name, a
name which the Emperor mentioned at St. Helena as that of one of his
bravest officers. Florent's grandfather was no other, indeed, than the
Colonel Chapron who, as Napoleon desired information, swam the Dnieper on
horseback, followed a Cossack on the opposite shore, hunted him like a
stag, laid him across his saddle and took him back to the French camp.
When the Empire fell, that hero, who had compromised himself in an
irreparable manner in the army of the Loire, left his country and,
accompanied by a handful of his old comrades, went to found in the
southern part of the United States, in Alabama, a sort