omplished man. The boy became, by the time he was twelve years old,
a lion-cub ill-trained, as formidable in his way as the father himself,
having free rein to tyrannize over every one, and using the privilege.

Etienne lived in the little house, or lodge, near the sea, given to him
by his father, and fitted up by the duchess with some of the comforts
and enjoyments to which he had a right. She herself spent the greater
part of her time there. Together the mother and child roamed over the
rocks and the shore, keeping strictly within the limits of the boy's
domain of beach and shells, of moss and pebbles. The boy's terror of his
father was so great that, like the Lapp, who lives and dies in his snow,
he made a native land of his rocks and his cottage, and was terrified
and uneasy if he passed his frontier.

The duchess, knowing her child was not fitted to find happiness except
in some humble and retired sphere, did not regret the fate that was thus
imposed upon him; she used this enforced vocation to prepare him for a
noble life of study and science, and she brought to the chateau Pierre
de Sebonde as tutor to the future priest. Nevertheless, in spite of
the tonsure imposed by the will of the father, she was determined that
Etienne's education should not be wholly ecclesiastical, and took pains
to secularize it. She employed Beauvouloir to teach him the mysteries of
natural science; she herself superintended his studies, regulating them
according to her child's strength, and enlivening them by teaching him
Italian, and revealing to him little by little the poetic beauties of
that language. While the duke rode off with Maximilien to the forest and
the wild-boars at the risk of his life, Jeanne wandered with Etienne
in the milky way of Petrarch's sonnets, or the mighty labyrinth of the
Divina Comedia. Nature had endowed the youth, in compensation for his
infirmities, with so melodious a voice that to hear him sing was
a constant delight; his mother taught him music, and their tender,
melancholy songs, accompanied by a mandolin, were the favorite
recreation promised as a reward for some more arduous study required by
the Abbe de Sebonde. Etienne listened to his mother with a passionate
admiration she had never seen except in the eyes of Georges de Chaverny.
The first time the poor woman found a memory of her girlhood in the
long, slow look of her child, she covered him with kisses; and she
blushed when Etienne asked her why