Emile adored his mother. His love for her was still the most fervent passion of his life. He had not seen her since the vacation, which they had passed together in Paris, free from the constant and frequent reproofs of their common master, Monsieur Cardonnet. They both suffered from the yoke they were compelled to wear, and they understood each other on that point, although they had never mentioned it. Madame Cardonnet, a gentle, affectionate, weak creature, felt that her son had a good share of her husband's mental energy and firmness, combined with a generous and sensitive heart which would expose him to great sorrow when those two masterful characters should come in collision on those points as to which their ideas differed. So she had swallowed all the disappointments of her life, taking care not to reveal them to her son, who was her only joy and her most dearly cherished consolation. Although she was not fully convinced of her husband's right to wound her and oppress her without remission, she had always seemed to accept her position as if in obedience to a law of nature and a religious precept. Passive obedience, thus taught by example, had become an instinctive habit in young Emile; but had it been otherwise, sound reasoning would long since have led him to adopt a different course. But when he saw that everybody bowed at the slightest indication of the paternal will, his mother first of all, it had not occurred to him that things might and should be different. Meanwhile the weight of the despotic atmosphere in which he lived had induced in him, from childhood, a sort of melancholy, of nameless unhappiness, of which he rarely sought the cause. It is a law of nature that children shall reverse the lessons that they do not like; and so Emile, early in life, had received from external facts an impulsion directly contrary to that which his father would fain have given him. The consequences of this natural and inevitable antagonism will be sufficiently developed by the progress of this narrative, so that it is unnecessary to describe them here.