desert scene, where at times the sun rays, reflected by the water,
by the sands, whitened the village of Batz and rippled on the roofs of
Croisic with pitiless brilliancy, filled Camille's dreaming mind for
days together. She seldom looked to the cool, refreshing scenes, the
groves, the flowery meadows around Guerande. Her soul was struggling to
endure a horrible inward anguish.

No sooner did Calyste see the vanes of the two gables shooting up beyond
the furze of the roadside and the distorted heads of the pines, than the
air seemed lighter; Guerande was a prison to him; his life was at Les
Touches. Who will not understand the attraction it presented to a youth
in his position. A love like that of Cherubin, had flung him at the feet
of a person who was a great and grand thing to him before he thought
of her as a woman, and it had survived the repeated and inexplicable
refusals of Felicite. This sentiment, which was more the need of loving
than love itself, had not escaped the terrible power of Camille for
analysis; hence, possibly, her rejection,--a generosity unperceived, of
course, by Calyste.

At Les Touches were displayed to the ravished eyes of the ignorant young
countryman, the riches of a new world; he heard, as it were, another
language, hitherto unknown to him and sonorous. He listened to the
poetic sounds of the finest music, that surpassing music of the
nineteenth century, in which melody and harmony blend or struggle on
equal terms,--a music in which song and instrumentation have reached a
hitherto unknown perfection. He saw before his eyes the works of modern
painters, those of the French school, to-day the heir of Italy, Spain,
and Flanders, in which talent has become so common that hearts, weary
of talent, are calling aloud for genius. He read there those works of
imagination, those amazing creations of modern literature which produced
their full effect upon his unused heart. In short, the great Nineteenth
Century appeared to him, in all its collective magnificence, its
criticising spirit, its desires for renovation in all directions, and
its vast efforts, nearly all of them on the scale of the giant who
cradled the infancy of the century in his banners and sang to it hymns
with the lullaby of cannon.

Initiated by Felicite into the grandeur of all these things, which may,
perhaps, escape the eyes of those who work them, Calyste gratified at
Les Touches the taste for the glorious, powerful at his age,