This thought terrified Michel, and sometimes cast him into the deepest dejection. "O father!" he was saying to himself, when we met him at the gate of a palace near his native town: "Did you not, through excessive affection for me, do yourself as well as me a great injury, by urging me on in the pathway of ambition? I do not know if I shall succeed, yet I feel that it will be very hard for me to resume the life which you lead, and for which fortune destined me. I am not so strong as you; I am a degenerate in the matter of physical strength, which is the stamp of nobility of our race. I cannot walk, I am fatigued beyond measure by what would be simply healthy exercise for you, at sixty years of age. And here am I used up, wounded in the foot, by my own fault, by reason of my absent-mindedness or my awkwardness. And yet I was born among these mountains, and I see children running over these sharp lava beds as I would walk on a carpet. Yes, my father was right, this is a beautiful fatherland; one may well be proud of having issued like the lava, from the sides of yonder terrible mountain! But one should be wholly, not half worthy of such a glorious origin. He should be a great man and fill the world with peals of thunder and lightning flashes; or else he should be a stout-hearted peasant or a determined brigand, and live in the desert, without other resource than a carbine and a pitiless heart. That too is a poetic destiny. But it is too late for me; I have learned too many things, I know the laws, society and mankind too well. That which is heroism in these artless and uncivilized mountaineers would be cowardice and crime in me. My conscience would reproach me for having succeeded in attaining grandeur by genius and the gifts of civilization, and for having relapsed, from impotence, to a condition of brigandage. So I should have to live an obscure, insignificant life!" Let us leave Michel for a little while to nurse and rub his aching foot, and inform the reader why, despite his love for Rome and the pleasant days he passed there, he found himself now at the gates of Catania. From month to month his sister had written to him, at her father's dictation: "You cannot come yet, and we cannot make any decision concerning our own future. The sick man is as well as a man can be who has lost the use of his arms and his legs. But his head still lives and retains a remnant of power. Here is some money; be careful of it, my child; for, although I have all the work I want, wages are lower here than at Rome."