"So you love me already, Mario? I am very glad! But how does it happen? You do not know me yet." "No matter, I love you." "And you do not know why?" "Yes I do! I love you because I love you." "My friend," said the marquis to Lucilio, "there is nothing so lovely and so lovable as childhood! It speaks as the angels must speak among themselves, and its reasons, which are no reasons, are worth more than all the wisdom of older heads. You must teach this cherub for me. You must fashion for him a noble brain like your own; for I am only an ignorant creature and I wish him to know much more than I do. The times are not so wholly given up to civil war as they were in my youth, and I think that gentlemen should turn their thoughts toward the enlightenment of the mind. But try to let him retain the pretty simple ways that he owes to his life among the shepherds. In truth he is my ideal of the lovely children who play among the flowers on the enchanted banks of the Lignon with its transparent waves." The marquis, having received from the hands of Adamas a cordial to refresh him after the exertions of the evening, went to bed and slept soundly, the happiest of men. At a time when, in default of regular legal processes, people were accustomed to take the law into their own hands, and when a suggestion of pardon would have been considered blameworthy and cowardly weakness, the marquis, although far more disposed than most of his contemporaries to display great gentleness in all his dealings, thought that he had performed the most sacred of duties, and therein he followed the ideas and usages in vogue when chivalry was in its prime. Certainly in those days it would have been impossible to find one gentleman in a thousand who would not have deemed himself possessed of the right to put to death by torture, or at least to order hanged before his eyes, a guilty wretch like D'Alvimar, and who would not have censured or ridiculed the excessively romantic sense of honor which Bois-Doré had displayed in his duel. Bois-Doré was well aware of it and was not disturbed by the knowledge. He had three reasons for being what he was: first of all his instinct, next the example of humanity set by Henri IV, who was one of the first men of his time to express disgust at the shedding of blood without peril to him who shed it. Henri III, when mortally wounded by Jacques Clement, was so upborne by rage and thirst for vengeance that he was able himself to strike his assassin, and to look on with joy when he was thrown from the window; when Henri IV was wounded in the face by Chastel, his first impulse was to say: "Let that man go!"--And thirdly, Bois-Doré's religious code was found in the acts and exploits of the heroes of _Astrée_.