.
I love you more than I love myself. I see the wrong I have done; I know
that you have in your veins my blood with that of your mother, whose
misery was my doing. Come to me; I will try to make you forget my
cruelty; I will cherish you for all that I have lost. Etienne, you are
the Duc de Nivron, and you will be, after me, the Duc d'Herouville, peer
of France, knight of the Orders and of the Golden Fleece, captain of a
hundred men-at-arms, grand-bailiff of Bessin, Governor of Normandy,
lord of twenty-seven domains counting sixty-nine steeples, Marquis de
Saint-Sever. You shall take to wife the daughter of a prince. Would you
have me die of grief? Come! come to me! or here I kneel until I see you.
Your old father prays you, he humbles himself before his child as before
God himself."

The hated son paid no heed to this language bristling with social
ideas and vanities he did not comprehend; his soul remained under the
impressions of unconquerable terror. He was silent, suffering great
agony. Towards evening the old seigneur, after exhausting all formulas
of language, all resources of entreaty, all repentant promises, was
overcome by a sort of religious contrition. He knelt down upon the sand
and made a vow:--

"I swear to build a chapel to Saint-Jean and Saint-Etienne, the patrons
of my wife and son, and to found one hundred masses in honor of the
Virgin, if God and the saints will restore to me the affection of my
son, the Duc de Nivron, here present."

He remained on his knees in deep humility with clasped hands, praying.
Finding that his son, the hope of his name, still did not come to him,
great tears rose in his eyes, dry so long, and rolled down his withered
cheeks. At this moment, Etienne, hearing no further sounds, glided to
the opening of his grotto like a young adder craving the sun. He saw the
tears of the stricken old man, he recognized the signs of a true grief,
and, seizing his father's hand, he kissed him, saying in the voice of an
angel:--

"Oh, mother! forgive me!"

In the fever of his happiness the old duke lifted his feeble offspring
in his arms and carried him, trembling like an abducted girl, toward
the castle. As he felt the palpitation of his son's body he strove to
reassure him, kissing him with all the caution he might have shown in
touching a delicate flower; and speaking in the gentlest tones he had
ever in his life used, in order to soothe him.

"God's truth! you are like my poor Jeann