t the battle of Chancellorsville, during the same war
which had ruined Florent's father in part. Mrs. Maitland, the poor
daughter of a small rector of a Presbyterian church at Newport, and who
had only married her husband for his money, had but one idea, when once a
widow--to go abroad. Whither? To Europe, vague and fascinating spot,
where she fancied she would be distinguished by her intelligence and her
beauty. She was pretty, vain and silly, and that voyage in pursuit of a
part to play in the Old World caused her to pass two years first in one
hotel and then in another, after which she married the second son of a
poor Irish peer, with the new chimera of entering that Olympus of British
aristocracy of which she had dreamed so much. She became a Catholic, and
her son with her, to obtain the result which cost her dear, for not only
was the lord who had given her his name brutal, a drunkard and cruel, but
he added to all those faults that of being one of the greatest gamblers
in the entire United Kingdom. He kept his stepson away from home, beat
his wife, and died toward 1880, after dissipating the poor creature's
fortune and almost all of Lincoln's. At that time the latter, whom his
stepfather had naturally left to develop in his own way, and who, since
leaving Beaumont, had studied painting at Venice, Rome and Paris, was in
the latter city and one of the first pupils in Bonnat's studio. Seeing
his mother ruined, without resources at forty-four years of age,
persuaded himself of his glorious future, he had one of those magnificent
impulses such as one has in youth and which prove much less the
generosity than the pride of life. Of the fifteen thousand francs of
income remaining to him, he gave up to his mother twelve thousand five
hundred. It is expedient to add that in less than a year afterward he
married the sister of his college friend and four hundred thousand
dollars. He had seen poverty and he was afraid of it. His action with
regard to his mother seemed to justify in his own eyes the purely
interested character of the combination which freed his brush forever.
There are, moreover, such artistic consciences. Maitland would not have
pardoned himself a concession of art. He considered rascals the painters
who begged success by compromise in their style, and he thought it quite
natural to take the money of Mademoiselle Chapron, whom he did not love,
and for whom, now that he had grown to manhood and knew several of her