fancy, recurred to him with terrible
intensity,--the artless pleasures and the trifling griefs, the little
hurts and the tender pettings, the hopes and the anxieties of those who
loved him, the smiles and tears of slaves ... And his first Creole
pony, a present from his father the day after he had proved himself
able to recite his prayers correctly in French, without one
mispronunciation--without saying crasse for grace,--and yellow Michel,
who taught him to swim and to fish and to paddle a pirogue;--and the
bayou, with its wonder-world of turtles and birds and creeping
things;--and his German tutor, who could not pronounce the j;--and the
songs of the cane-fields,--strangely pleasing, full of quaverings and
long plaintive notes, like the call of the cranes ... Tou', tou' pays
blanc! ... Afterward Camaniere had leased the place;--everything must
have been changed; even the songs could not be the same. Tou', tou'
pays blare!--Danie qui commande ...

And then Paris; and the university, with its wild under-life,--some
debts, some follies; and the frequent fond letters from home to which
he might have replied so much oftener;--Paris, where talent is
mediocrity; Paris, with its thunders and its splendors and its seething
of passion;--Paris, supreme focus of human endeavor, with its madnesses
of art, its frenzied striving to express the Inexpressible, its
spasmodic strainings to clutch the Unattainable, its soarings of
soul-fire to the heaven of the Impossible ...

What a rejoicing there was at his return!--how radiant and level the
long Road of the Future seemed to open before him!--everywhere
friends, prospects, felicitations. Then his first serious love;--and
the night of the ball at St. Martinsville,--the vision of light!
Gracile as a palm, and robed at once so simply, so exquisitely in
white, she had seemed to him the supreme realization of all possible
dreams of beauty ... And his passionate jealousy; and the slap from
Laroussel; and the humiliating two-minute duel with rapiers in which he
learned that he had found his master. The scar was deep. Why had not
Laroussel killed him then? ... Not evil-hearted, Laroussel,--they
used to salute each other afterward when they met; and Laroussel's
smile was kindly. Why had he refrained from returning it? Where was
Laroussel now?

For the death of his generous father, who had sacrificed so much to
reform him; for the death, only a short while after, of his
all-forgiving