"I will love thee with all my heart," he answered with the effusive manner of an urchin towards his sweetheart. Such was Maxime and Renée's first interview. The lad did not go to school till a month later. During the earlier days his stepmother played with him as with a doll. She polished off his countryfied air, and it must be added that he seconded her with extreme willingness. When he appeared, dressed from head to foot in new clothes supplied by his father's tailor, she gave a cry of joyous surprise. He was as pretty as a heart, such was her expression. The only thing was that his hair grew with most annoying sluggishness. The young woman frequently said that all one's face was in one's hair. She tended her own devoutly. For a long while she had been greatly worried by its colour, that particular pale yellow tint, which reminded one of the best butter. But when the fashion of wearing yellow hair set in she was delighted, and to make people believe that she did not follow the fashion by compulsion she declared that she dyed her hair every month. Maxime was already terribly knowing for his thirteen years. His was one of those frail precocious natures in which the senses assert themselves early. He practised vice even before he knew desire. On two occasions he had all but been expelled from the college. Had Renée's eyes been accustomed to provincial graces she would have noticed that, despite his ill-fitting clothes, the little shearling, as she called him, smiled, turned his neck and extended his arms in a pretty way, with the feminine air of those who serve as schoolboys' girls. He was very careful about his hands, which were slight and long; and although his hair remained cropped short by order of the principal, an ex-colonel of engineers, he possessed a little looking-glass which he pulled out of his pocket during lesson time, which he placed between the pages of his book, and into which he gazed for whole hours, examining his eyes, his gums, making pretty faces at himself, and learning various kinds of coquetry. His schoolfellows hung round his blouse as round a skirt, and he buckled his belt so tightly that he had a grown woman's slim waist and undulation of the hips. To tell the truth, he received as many blows as caresses. The college of Plassans, a den of little bandits, like most provincial colleges, thus proved to be a hotbed of contamination in which Maxime's neutral temperament and childhood fraught with evil owing to some mysterious hereditary cause, were singularly developed. Fortunately age was about to alter him. But the trace of his childish abandonments, the effemination of his whole being, the time when he had thought himself a girl, were destined to remain in him and strike him for ever in his virility.