flushed, and did not speak for a few moments; he was
visibly embarrassed. Then he smiled in a melancholy and gentle manner,
which was peculiar to him, and said:

"My dear friend, if it will not weary you, I can give you some very
strange particulars about my life. I know that you are a sensible man,
so I do not fear that our friendship will suffer by my revelations, and
should it suffer, I should not care about having you for my friend any
longer.

"My mother, Madame de Courcils, was a poor little timid woman, whom her
husband had married for the sake of her fortune, and her whole life was
one of martyrdom. Of a loving, delicate mind, she was constantly being
ill-treated by the man who ought to have been my father, one of those
bores called country gentleman. A month after their marriage he was
living with a servant, and besides that, the wives and daughters of his
tenants were his mistresses, which did not prevent him from having three
children by his wife, or three, if you count me in. My mother said
nothing, and lived in that noisy house like a little mouse. Set aside,
disparaged, nervous, 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
gray-blonde, as if her hair had lost its color through her constant
fears.

"Among Monsieur de Courcil's friends who constantly came to the
_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
energetic resolutions, Monsieur de Bourneval, whose name I bear. He was
a tall, thin man, with a heavy black moustache, and I am very like him.
He was a man who had read a great deal, and whose 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
long beforehand prepared 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 intrigue
was carried on so secretly, that no one guessed it. The poor, neglected,
unhappy woman, must have clung to him in a despairing manner, and in her
intimacy with him must have imbibed all his ways of thinkin