sublime in his dauntless manliness:-- Il n'est qu'un seul honneur, il est tant de maîtresses.[3] He had almost quoted it in characterizing his son's passion as a mere passing crisis, and once more there was a world of compassion, a world of affection in the tone in which he renewed the conversation, in order to divert his mind from his thoughts:-- "Can you imagine the existence of that woman here, under the Terror? You know that a denunciation against her was the cause of the proposal of that villain Roland, in a committee of the Legislative Assembly, in November, '92, that the decree of the 20th of September should be suspended so far as the wives of 'émigrés' were concerned. If it had not been for the procureur-syndic de Thury, a former gardener of ours, her being legally divorced would have availed her nothing, they would have taken everything from her, and her life with the rest. She never ceased to correspond with her husband. She went twice to see him, and she received him here three times. One shudders to think of those interviews! But what courage! What heroism, to repeat my former word! It was of us that she was thinking, she was determined to defend the inheritance, the House. With her jewels she might have passed all those years happily in Germany or in England, and she died, worn out with grief, in 1804. From veneration for her memory, my grandfather would never allow anything to be changed inside the château, nor my father, nor I. Nothing, nothing, nothing. When I am no longer here, I authorize you to have the telephone put in, as you are more _up-to-date_ than your old father," he concluded, laughingly, "but that's all!--Ah! there's the worthy Bressieux conspiring with Chaffin again. They are far greater changes that he has in his head than the installation of a telephone. It seems that certain details are not in style, and thereupon Monsieur Chaffin comes and bores me with dissertations on door-knobs and tiles at the back of the fireplace, and shutter-fastenings, which Bressieux has taught him. Nothing, nothing, nothing! I will change nothing. I don't know where I have read that line of an English poet, 'The Siren loves the sea, and I the past.'--Come, come, Bressieux!" he cried in his strong, resonant voice through the window of the automobile, "don't spoil Chaffin for me altogether. He will end by refusing to live at Grandchamp any longer, because it's not pure enough."