"We shall see," he would say to himself, "if such things will terrify me, and if such a blast will make me bend when he raises his hand against the sacred ark of my love.--O father! you have succeeded in turning me aside from the studies to which I was devoted, in stifling all my aspirations in my bosom, in wounding my self-esteem with impunity and trampling on my sympathies. If you demand the sacrifice of my intelligence and my inclinations, why, I will submit once more. But the sacrifice of my love! Ah! you are too prudent, too discerning to demand it, for if you did, you would see that, while I am your son to love you, I have your blood in my veins to resist you. We should shatter ourselves against each other, like two machines of equal strength, and you would have to become a parricide in order to win the victory." Awaiting that terrible day, which Emile accustomed himself to contemplate, he allowed his father's secret rancor to vent itself in empty words against the worthy Antoine and his faithful Janille. It had even become a matter of indifference whether he did or did not allude to the doubtful parentage of the count's daughter. It mattered little to him whether she had plebeian blood in her veins, and he hardly heard what Monsieur Cardonnet said on that subject. It seemed to him, furthermore, that it would have been an insult to Gilberte's father to seek to defend him against the other accusations of his father. He smiled almost like a martyr, who receives a wound and defies pain. Thus, despite all his shrewdness, Cardonnet was on the wrong road and was dragging his son with him into the abyss, flattering himself that he could readily hold him back when they had reached the brink. He thought that he knew the human heart, because he knew the secret of human weaknesses; but he who knows only the weak and miserable side of men and things, knows only half of the truth. "I have made him submit on more important occasions," he said to himself; "an _amourette_ is of no account." He was right as to _amourettes_; perhaps he had had experience of them; but a great passion was to him an inaccessible ideal, and he had no conception of the sublime or disastrous resolutions it can inspire. It may be that Monsieur de Boisguilbault contributed in some degree to allay Emile's tempestuous ardor in regard to social questions; sometimes his tone of glacial security had aroused the impetuous youth's impatience; but more frequently he realized that tranquil prophet was right in submitting patiently to the present, in view of what the future was certain to bring forth. When the marquis discoursed to him in the name of the logic of ideas--sovereign of all worlds and mother of human destinies--instead of irritating him as Monsieur Cardonnet did by invoking the false and clumsy logic of facts, he succeeded in pacifying and convincing him.