"And you will cease to look upon me as your father?" said Monsieur Cardonnet. "No, Emile; stay with me, but be perfectly free. I give you three months, during which, living as you will in the bosom of your family, far from the declamations of the beardless philosophers who have ruined you, you will recover your senses unassisted. You are blessed with a robust temperament, and it may be that absorbing mental labor has overheated your brain. I look upon you as a sick child whom I have taken into the country to cure. Walk, ride, hunt; in a word, amuse yourself in order to reestablish your equilibrium, which seems to me more disturbed than that of society. I hope that you will abate your intolerance when you see that your home is not a hotbed of wickedness and corruption. Before long, perhaps, you will tell me voluntarily that profitless musing bores you, and that you feel that you must help me." Emile bowed, without speaking, and left his father, after embracing him with a feeling of profound sorrow. Monsieur Cardonnet, having been able to do nothing better than temporize, tossed about a long while in his bed, and finally fell asleep, saying, to himself, contrary to his custom, that one must sometimes rely more upon Providence than upon oneself. XIV FIRST LOVE The energetic Cardonnet, entirely engrossed by his daily occupations, or sufficiently self-controlled not to allow the slightest trace of his inward suffering to appear on the surface, resumed his air of glacial dignity on the following day. Emile, overwhelmed with dismay and sadness, strove to smile in presence of his mother, who was disturbed by his distraught air and altered expression. But she was so overawed that she lacked even the penetration peculiar to her sex. All her faculties had grown rusty, and at forty she was already an octogenarian, mentally speaking. And yet she loved her husband, as the result of a need of loving which had never been satisfied. She had no definite grievances to allege against him, for he had never openly maltreated her or made a slave of her; but every impulse of the heart or the imagination had always been stifled in her by irony and a sort of contemptuous pity, and she had accustomed herself to entertain no thought or desire outside of the circle drawn about her by an inflexible hand. To oversee all the details of the housekeeping had become something more than a wise and self-imposed occupation. It had been made a law of her existence, so serious and so sacred that she might have been compared to a Roman matron in respect to the trivial solemnity of domestic toil, if in no other respect. Thus she presented in her person the strange anachronism of a woman of our own time, capable of reasoning and feeling, but who had insanely forced herself to retrograde some thousands of years in order to make herself like one of those women of ancient times whose glory it was to proclaim the inferiority of their sex.