During my childhood and early youth I had a great respect for my father, but not much affection. Indeed, throughout this period I saw only the sombre side of his character—the one side that showed itself in domestic life, for which he was not fitted. Later, when I was old enough to go out with him, I was surprised and charmed to find in him a person perfectly new to me. It seemed as if, in our old family house, he felt himself constrained by some fatal spell; once beyond its doors, his forehead cleared, his chest expanded, and he was young again. "Now, Maxime," he would cry, "now for a gallop!" And joyously we would rush along. His shouts of youthful pleasure, his enthusiasm, his fantastic wit, his bursts of feeling, charmed my young heart, and I longed to bring something of all this back to my poor mother, forgotten in her corner at home. I began to love my father; and when I saw all the sympathetic qualities of his brilliant nature displayed in all the functions of social life—at hunts and races, balls and dinners—my fondness for him became an actual admiration. A perfect horseman, a dazzling talker, a bold gambler, daring and open-handed, he became for me the finished type of manly grace and chivalrous nobility. Indeed, he would speak of himself—smiling with some bitterness—as the last of the gentlemen. Such was my father in society; but as soon as he returned to his home my mother and I saw only a restless, morose, and violent old man. My father’s outbursts to a creature so sweet and delicate as my mother would certainly have revolted me had they not been followed by the quick returns of tenderness and the redoubled attentions I have mentioned. Justified in my eyes by these proofs of penitence, my father seemed to be only a naturally kind, warm-hearted man sometimes irritated beyond endurance by an obstinate and systematic opposition to all his tastes and preferences. I thought my mother was suffering from some nervous derangement. My father gave me to understand so, though, and as I thought very properly, he only referred to this subject with great reserve. I could not understand what were my mother’s feelings towards my father; they were—for me—beyond analysis or definition. Sometimes a strange severity glittered in the looks she fixed on him; but it was only a flash, and the next moment her beautiful soft eyes and her unchanged face showed nothing but tender devotion and passionate submission. My mother had been married at fifteen, and I was nearly twenty-two when my sister, my poor Hélène, was born. One morning soon afterwards my father came out of my mother’s room looking anxious. He signed to me to follow him into the garden. "Maxime," he said, after walking in silence for a little, "your mother gets stranger and stranger." "She is so ill just now, father." "Yes, of course. But now she has the oddest fancy: she wants you to study law."