France -- Fiction; French fiction -- Translations into English; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Nobility -- France -- Fiction
When the count again left home Jeanne was pregnant. This time she gave
birth in due season, and not without great suffering, to a stout boy,
who soon became the living image of his father, so that the hatred of
the count for his first-born was increased by this event. To save her
cherished child the countess agreed to all the plans which her husband
formed for the happiness and wealth of his second son, whom he named
Maximilien. Etienne was to be made a priest, in order to leave the
property and titles of the house of Herouville to his younger brother.
At that cost the poor mother believed she ensured the safety of her
hated child.
No two brothers were ever more unlike than Etienne and Maximilien. The
younger’s taste was all for noise, violent exercises, and war, and
the count felt for him the same excessive love that his wife felt for
Etienne. By a tacit compact each parent took charge of the child of
their heart. The duke (for about this time Henri IV. rewarded the
services of the Seigneur d’Herouville with a dukedom), not wishing, he
said, to fatigue his wife, gave the nursing of the youngest boy to
a stout peasant-woman chosen by Beauvouloir, and announced his
determination to bring up the child in his own manner. He gave him,
as time went on, a holy horror of books and study; taught him the
mechanical knowledge required by a military career, made him a good
rider, a good shot with an arquebuse, and skilful with his dagger. When
the boy was big enough he took him to hunt, and let him acquire the
savage language, the rough manners, the bodily strength, and the
vivacity of look and speech which to his mind were the attributes of an
accomplished man. The boy became, by the time he was twelve years old,
a lion-cub ill-trained, as formidable in his way as the father himself,
having free rein to tyrannize over every one, and using the privilege.
Etienne lived in the little house, or lodge, near the sea, given to him
by his father, and fitted up by the duchess with some of the comforts
and enjoyments to which he had a right. She herself spent the greater
part of her time there. Together the mother and child roamed over the
rocks and the shore, keeping strictly within the limits of the boy’s
domain of beach and shells, of moss and pebbles. The boy’s terror of his
father was so great that, like the Lapp, who lives and dies in his snow,
he made a native land of his rocks and his cottage, and was terrified
and uneasy if he passed his frontier.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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