ter and not having any mother, his loving
heart had need of attaching itself to some one who could fill the place
of his relatives, or whether Maitland exercised over him a special
prestige by his opposite qualities. Fragile and somewhat delicate, was
he seduced by the strength and dexterity which his friend exhibited in
all his exercises? Timid and naturally taciturn, was he governed by
the assurance of that athlete with the loud laugh, with the invincible
energy? Did the surprising tendency toward art which the other one
showed conquer him, as well as sympathy for the misfortunes which were
confided to him and which touched him more than they touched him who
experienced them?

Gordon Maitland, Lincoln's father, of an excellent family of New York,
had been killed at 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