stay for hours, motionless, mute,
his mouth hanging, his eyes blinking, hushed by the strident monotony of
the grasshopper's cry--a blotch of humanity in the splendid horizon.

This, this was the first-born, Bernard's brother, the darling child of
his father and mother, the glorious hope of the nail-maker's family.
Slaves, like so many others in the Midi, to the superstition of the
rights of primogeniture, they had made every possible sacrifice to send
to Paris their fine, ambitious lad, who set out assured of success, the
admiration of all the young women of the town; and Paris, after having
for six years, beaten, twisted, and squeezed in its great vat the
brilliant southern stripling, after having burnt him with all its
vitriol, rolled him in all its mud, finished by sending him back in
this state of wreckage, stupefied and paralyzed--killing his father with
sorrow, and forcing his mother to sell her all, and live as a sort of
char-woman in the better-class houses of her own country-side. Lucky it
was that just then, when this broken piece of humanity, discharged
from all the hospitals of Paris, was sent back by public charity to
Bourg-Saint-Andeol, Bernard--he whom they called Cadet, as in these
southern families, half Arab as they are, the eldest always takes the
family name, and the last-comer that of Cadet--Bernard was at Tunis
making his fortune, and sending home money regularly. But what pain it
was for the poor mother to owe everything, even the life, the comfort
of the sad invalid, to the robust and courageous boy whom his father and
she had loved without any tenderness; who, since he was five years old,
they had treated as a "hand," because he was very strong, woolly-headed,
and ugly, and even then knew better than any one in the house how to
deal in old nails. Ah! how she longed to have him near her, her Cadet,
to make some return to him for all the good he did, to pay at last the
debt of love and motherly tenderness that she owed him!

But, you see, these princely fortunes have the burdens, the wearinesses
of royal lives. This poor mother, in her dazzling surroundings, was very
like a real queen: familiar with long exiles, cruel separations, and the
trials which detract from greatness; one of her sons forever stupefied,
the other far away, seldom writing, absorbed in his business, saying,
"I will come," and never coming. She had only seen him once in twelve
years, and then in the whirl of a visit of the Be