Not until manhood did Florian appreciate his father, and come properly to admire the exactness with which the third Duke of Puysange had kept touch with his times. Under the Sun King’s first mistress Gaston de Puysange had cultivated sentiment, under the second, warfare, and under the third, religion: he had thus stayed always in the sunshine. It was Florian’s lot to know his father only during the last period, so the boy’s youth as spent dividedly at the Duke’s two châteaux, at Storisende and at Bellegarde, lacked for no edifying influence. The long summer days at Storisende were diversified with all appropriate religious instruction. In winter the atmosphere of Versailles itself—where the long day of Louis Quatorze seemed now to be ending in a twilight of stately serenity through which the old King went deathward, handsomely sustained by his consciousness of a well-spent life and by the reverent homage of all his bastards,—was not more pious than was that of Bellegarde. Let none suppose that Monsieur de Puysange affected superhuman austerities. Rather, he exercised tact. If he did not keep all fast-days, he never failed to secure the proper dispensations, nor to see that his dependants fasted scrupulously: and if he sometimes, even now, was drawn into argument, Monsieur de Puysange was not ever known after any lethal duel to omit the ordering of a mass, at the local Church of Holy Hoprig, for his adversary’s soul. “There are amenities,” he would declare, “imperative among well-bred Christians.” Then too, when left a widower at the birth of his second legitimate son, the Duke did not so far yield to the temptings of the flesh as to take another wife; for he confessed to scruples if marriage, which the Scriptures assert to be unknown in heaven, could anywhere be a quite laudable estate: but he saw to it that his boys were tended by a succession of good-looking and amiable governesses. His priests also were kept sleek, and his confessor unshocked, by the Duke’s tireless generosity to the Church; and were all of unquestioned piety, which they did not carry to excess. In fine, with youth and sentiment, and the discomforts of warfare also, put well behind him, the good gentleman had elected to live discreetly, among reputable but sympathetic companions.... When Florian told his father now about Florian’s delightful adventure in Acaire, the Duke smiled: and he said that, in this dream begotten by Florian’s late reading of the fairy tales of Monsieur Perrault, Florian had been peculiarly privileged.