r; a sweet and strange thing was a human
affection to him, who had hitherto loved his books alone.

This affection developed to a singular point; in a soul so new, it was
like a first love. Separated since infancy from his parents, whom he had
hardly known; cloistered and immured, as it were, in his books; eager
above all things to study and to learn; exclusively attentive up to
that time, to his intelligence which broadened in science, to his
imagination, which expanded in letters,--the poor scholar had not yet
had time to feel the place of his heart.

This young brother, without mother or father, this little child which
had fallen abruptly from heaven into his arms, made a new man of him.
He perceived that there was something else in the world besides the
speculations of the Sorbonne, and the verses of Homer; that man needed
affections; that life without tenderness and without love was only a set
of dry, shrieking, and rending wheels. Only, he imagined, for he was at
the age when illusions are as yet replaced only by illusions, that the
affections of blood and family were the sole ones necessary, and that a
little brother to love sufficed to fill an entire existence.

He threw himself, therefore, into the love for his little Jehan with the
passion of a character already profound, ardent, concentrated; that poor
frail creature, pretty, fair-haired, rosy, and curly,--that orphan with
another orphan for his only support, touched him to the bottom of his
heart; and grave thinker as he was, he set to meditating upon Jehan
with an infinite compassion. He kept watch and ward over him as over
something very fragile, and very worthy of care. He was more than a
brother to the child; he became a mother to him.

Little Jehan had lost his mother while he was still at the breast;
Claude gave him to a nurse. Besides the fief of Tirechappe, he had
inherited from his father the fief of Moulin, which was a dependency of
the square tower of Gentilly; it was a mill on a hill, near the chateau
of Winchestre (Bicetre). There was a miller's wife there who was nursing
a fine child; it was not far from the university, and Claude carried the
little Jehan to her in his own arms.

From that time forth, feeling that he had a burden to bear, he took life
very seriously. The thought of his little brother became not only his
recreation, but the object of his studies. He resolved to consecrate
himself entirely to a future for which he was respons