, sent him the brevet of Major. It was an empty honor, for the hand
which signed this promotion soon renounced all human grandeur and all
command.

The wound of Ireneus was severe. The kind attentions however which
surrounded, protected him from danger of death. As soon as he was
beginning to grow well, he went to his mother's house, where his cure
was completed. There he heard of the new exile of those for whom his
father had shed his blood and of the establishment of the new monarchy.
Many of his friends were soon induced to connect themselves with the new
monarchy which retained them in service, and even conferred special
compliments on them, and they wrote to induce him to follow their
example. Such a thought never entered his mind. Without partaking of the
exaggerated hatred of many of the Legitimists against the new monarchy,
he had stated that he would never serve it. He was not a man to violate a
promise. But he was subject to the danger of inactivity, the greatest
torment of active and strong minds. As an ambitious man examines with
great uneasiness the path which leads him to power, as the speculator
contemplates the capricious whims of fortune, as the young officer
waiting orders looks in every direction for action, did Ireneus. More
than once he resolved to join his fortunes with those of the exiled
princes in the arena of public opinion. They however had submitted to
their fate, and no longer appealed to their faithful servants. The time
of Royal crusades had gone by. Sovereigns made uneasy by the
effervescence of revolutions, which like a contagion spread over Europe,
had enough to do to secure their own thrones, and had no disposition to
ruin themselves in lifting up that of a neighbor.

Madame de Vermondans, after striving in vain to amuse her son, induced
him to visit his uncle in Sweden, hoping that travel would restore quiet
to his mind. It was one of those healthful remedies which often escape
the observation of science, and are suggested only by the ingenuity of
tenderness. Nothing in certain moral diseases is more efficacious than
travel. He who after having enjoyed all the emotions of active life,
finds himself at once condemned to the sterility of idleness, suffers
under a perpetual fever. Within him there is as it were an ever-acting
spring he strives with a constant effort to repress.

His intellectual and physical faculties, his imagination, his senses seek
to resume their old power. If the