ry 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 of agricultural
colony, to which they gave the name--which it still preserves--of
Arcola, a naive and melancholy tribute to the fabulous epoch which,
however, had been dear to them.

Who would have recognized the brilliant colonel, who penetrated by the
side of Montbrun the heart of the Grande Redoute, in the planter of
forty-five, busy with his cotton and his sugar-cane, who made a fortune
in a short time by dint of energy and good sense? His success, told of
in France, was the indirect cause of another emigration to Texas, led by
General Lallemand, and which terminated so disastrously. Colonel Chapron
had not, as can be believed, acquired in roaming through Europe very
scrupulous notions an the relations of the two sexes. Having made the
mother of his child a pretty and sweet-tempered mulattress whom he met
on a short trip to New Orleans, and whom he brought back to Arcola, he
became deeply attached to the charming creature and to his son, so much
the more so as, with a simple difference of complexion and of hair,
the child was the image of him. Indeed, the old warrior, who had no
relatives in his native land, on dying, left his entire fortune to that
son, whom he had christened Napoleon. While he lived, not one of his
neighbors dared to treat the young man differently from the way in which
his father treated him.

But it was not the same when the prestige of the Emperor's soldier was
not there to protect the boy against that aversion to race which is
morally a prejudice, but socially interprets an instinct of preservation
of infallible surety. The United States has grown only on that
condition.

[Those familiar with the works of Bourget will recognize