Urbain (the Marquis) felt this partiality and suffered from it; but he never allowed himself to complain, and perhaps, already putting a just estimate upon his brother, he did not care to contend with him on such frivolous grounds. In the course of time, the Marchioness found out that she had been greatly mistaken, and that sentiments should be judged by deeds rather than by words; but the habit of spoiling her prodigal son had now become fixed, and to this she soon added a tender pity for the bewildered perversity which seemed to be leading the wilful youth to his own destruction. This perversity, however, did not take its rise in an evil heart. Vanity at first, and dissipation afterward, then the loss of energy, and at last the tyranny of vice,--that, briefly, is the history of this man, charming without real refinement, good without grandeur of soul, sceptical without atheism. At the age when we are describing him, there was in him an awful void in the place where his conscience should have been, and yet it was a conscience rather absent than dead. There would sometimes be returns of it, and struggles with it, fewer and briefer indeed than they had been in his youth, but perhaps on that account all the more desperate; and the one which was going on within him at this time was so cruel that he laid his hand repeatedly upon one of his splendid weapons, as if he were haunted by the spectre of suicide; but he thought of his mother, pushed away the pistols and locked them up, putting both hands to his head, in the fear that he was becoming insane. He had always looked upon money as nothing. His mother's noble disinterested theories on the subject had made the way of false reasoning easy to him. Nevertheless he understood that, in effecting his mother's ruin, he had overstepped his right. He was astounded; he had gone on up to the last, promising himself that he would stop before reaching his brother's fortune, and then he had seriously encroached upon it; but the truth is, that he had not done this knowingly; for, from motives of delicacy, the Marquis had kept no accounts with him in matters of detail, and would never have mentioned them at all, had it not been for the necessity of preserving by an appeal to his honor the little which was left. The Duke therefore did not feel himself guilty of deliberate selfishness, and had reproached Urbain warmly and sincerely for not having warned him sooner. He saw at last the abyss opened by his lawless and reckless conduct; he was bitterly ashamed of having injured his brother's prospects and of having no way to repair the harm, without infringing upon certain rigid principles established by his mother and his education.