em, or
because they have no poesy in their souls. If there exists in the
provinces a mall, a promenade, a vantage-ground from which a fine view
can be obtained, that is the point to which no one goes. Athanase was
fond of this solitude, enlivened by the sparkling water, where the
fields were the first to green under the earliest smiling of the
springtide sun. Those persons who saw him sitting beneath a poplar,
and who noticed the vacant eye which he turned to them, would say to
Madame Granson:--

"Something is the matter with your son."

"I know what it is," the mother would reply; hinting that he was
meditating over some great work.

Athanase no longer took part in politics: he ceased to have opinions;
but he appeared at times quite gay,--gay with the satire of those who
think to insult a whole world with their own individual scorn. This
young man, outside of all the ideas and all the pleasures of the
provinces, interested few persons; he was not even an object of
curiosity. If persons spoke of him to his mother, it was for her sake,
not his. There was not a single soul in Alencon that sympathized with
his; not a woman, not a friend came near to dry his tears; they
dropped into the Sarthe. If the gorgeous Suzanne had happened that
way, how many young miseries might have been born of the meeting! for
the two would surely have loved each other.

She did come, however. Suzanne's ambition was early excited by the
tale of a strange adventure which had happened at the tavern of the
More,--a tale which had taken possession of her childish brain. A
Parisian woman, beautiful as the angels, was sent by Fouche to
entangle the Marquis de Montauran, otherwise called "The Gars," in a
love-affair (see "The Chouans"). She met him at the tavern of the More
on his return from an expedition to Mortagne; she cajoled him, made
him love her, and then betrayed him. That fantastic power--the power
of beauty over mankind; in fact, the whole story of Marie de Verneuil
and the Gars--dazzled Suzanne; she longed to grow up in order to play
upon men. Some months after her hasty departure she passed through her
native town with an artist on his way to Brittany. She wanted to see
Fougeres, where the adventure of the Marquis de Montauran culminated,
and to stand upon the scene of that picturesque war, the tragedies of
which, still so little known, had filled her childish mind. Besides
this, she had a fancy to pass through Alencon so elegantly equ