The mentality of Eugène Fromentin developed early. At school, he surprised all his instructors by his ability to assimilate knowledge and to think things out for himself, and he was loved by them all. Later on, he confessed that “his childhood had been very lively, almost boisterous.” But somewhere during his fifteenth year, a marked change took place in him. “I had involuntarily formed the habit,” he confessed further, “of reserve and silence, a habit that was often to my disadvantage, and which was respected quite as much through pity as through tolerance. Yet it is to this habit that I owed the chance to develop in accordance with my nature; otherwise, I should have grown up warped and unfit.” And M. Pierre Blanchon, from whose admirably documented volume[1] these details are borrowed, adds further: “His views upon art and poetry clashed with the bourgeois ideas of his environment; the doctor looked upon them as mere nonsense, while his mother feared that they would lead him into temptation.” As a matter of fact, at the very period when he was passing through the moral crisis of adolescence, a romantic attachment shook his soul to its very depths with the emotions of love. [1] Eugène Fromentin, _Lettres de Jeunesse_. About half a league from town, just before entering the village of Saint-Maurice, the Fromentins owned a country place. The country roundabout is nothing but a level plain, fertile and bare, stretching away to the coast, where the sea, harnessed by Richelieu, loses, among its encroaching capes and islands, all its grandeur and poetry. Among their country neighbours there happened to be a certain Madame X., left, at the age of forty-three, the widow of a captain in the merchant marine. She spent her winters at La Rochelle and her summers at Saint-Maurice. She had a daughter, born at Port Louis, in the island of Martinique, in 1817, and consequently three years older than Eugène Fromentin. Madeleine--let us, from a feeling of pious respect, refer to her only by the name she bears in _Dominique_--Madeleine, being of Creole blood on her mother’s side, had the darkest of hair and eyes, combined with a fair and almost colourless complexion. We know next to nothing about her. He had conceived for her a violent attachment. Brusquely, she was snatched from the heaven in which the secret hopes and dreams of his fifteen years had framed her. She became the wife of an assistant collector of taxes. Fromentin suffered impotently from jealousy, and all the more because his passion was sincere and ingenuous. His light-heartedness vanished, together with his self-assurance; he mistrusted his own sentiments, he probed and analyzed his thoughts. To retire to the comforting privacy of his fireside and bury himself in literary work, poetry, critical essays, fragments of drama, such was his way of healing his wounds.