mply taught him to follow
his own fancies; he had been idolized by those who had the care of him
in childhood, and adored by the companions who shared in his boyish
escapades, and so he had formed a habit of looking and judging
everything as it affected his own pleasure; he took it as a matter of
course when good souls saved him from the consequences of his follies,
a piece of mistaken kindness which could only lead to his ruin.
Victurnien's early training, noble and pious though it was, had isolated
him too much. He was out of the current of the life of the time, for the
life of a provincial town is certainly not in the main current of the
age; Victurnien's true destiny lifted him above it. He had learned
to think of an action, not as it affected others, nor relatively, but
absolutely from his own point of view. Like despots, he made the law
to suit the circumstance, a system which works in the lives of prodigal
sons the same confusion which fancy brings into art.

Victurnien was quick-sighted, he saw clearly and without illusion, but
he acted on impulse, and unwisely. An indefinable flaw of character,
often seen in young men, but impossible to explain, led him to will one
thing and do another. In spite of an active mind, which showed itself
in unexpected ways, the senses had but to assert themselves, and the
darkened brain seemed to exist no longer. He might have astonished wise
men; he was capable of setting fools agape. His desires, like a sudden
squall of bad weather, overclouded all the clear and lucid spaces of his
brain in a moment; and then, after the dissipations which he could not
resist, he sank, utterly exhausted in body, heart, and mind, into a
collapsed condition bordering upon imbecility. Such a character will
drag a man down into the mire if he is left to himself, or bring him to
the highest heights of political power if he has some stern friend
to keep him in hand. Neither Chesnel, nor the lad's father, nor Aunt
Armande had fathomed the depths of a nature so nearly akin on many sides
to the poetic temperament, yet smitten with a terrible weakness at its
core.

By the time the old town lay several miles away, Victurnien felt not the
slightest regret; he thought no more about the father, who had loved ten
generations in his son, nor of the aunt, and her almost insane devotion.
He was looking forward to Paris with vehement ill-starred longings; in
thought he had lived in that fairyland, it had been t