feel a pity for the weak which will be my ruin; for the
weak are pitiless towards the strong.

Poor Alfred must be an excellent fellow not to have thrown me out of
the window. I was so dull with him, so provoking, so harsh, so scoffing,
that I am astonished that he could endure me for two minutes. My nerves
were in such a state of irritation that I beheaded with my whip more
than five hundred poppies along the road. I who never have committed an
assault upon any foliage, whose conscience is innocent of the murder of
a single flower! For a moment I had a notion to ask a catafalque of the
romantic Marquise. You may judge from that the disordered state of my
faculties and my complete moral prostration.

At last, ashamed of abusing Alfred's hospitality in such a manner, and
feeling incapable of being anything else than irritable, cross-grained
and intractable, I returned to Richeport, to be as gloomy and
disagreeable as I pleased.

Here, dear Roger, I pause--I take time, as the actors say; it is worth
while. As fluently as you may read hieroglyphics, and explain on the
spot the riddles of the sphinx, you can never guess what I found at
Richeport, in my mother's room! A white black-bird? a black swan? a
crocodile? a megalonyx? Priest John or the amorabaquin? No, something
more enchantingly improbable, more wildly impossible. What was it? I
will tell you, for a hundred million guesses would never bring you
nearer the truth.

Near the window, by my mother's side, sat a young woman, bending over an
embroidery frame, threading a needle with red worsted. At the sound of
my voice she raised her head and I recognised--Louise Gruerin!

At this unexpected sight, I stood stupified, like Pradon's Hippolyte.

To see Louise Guerin quietly seated in my mother's room, was as
electrifying as if you, on going home some morning, were to find Irene
de Chateaudun engaged in smoking one of your cigars. Did some strange
chance, some machiavellian combination introduce Louise at Richeport? I
shall soon know.

What a queer way to avoid men, to take up one's abode among them! Only
prudes have such ideas. At any rate it is a gross insult to my powers
of fascination. I am not such a patriarch as all that! My head still
counts a few hairs, and I can walk very well without a cane!

What does it matter, after all? Louise lives under the same roof with
me, my mother treats her in the most gracious manner, like an equal.
And, indeed, one would be