h.

_Andre_--God bless me, no. I am only saying to you why I have not
looked after your interests better than you have ever done so
yourself.

_Count_--Very good, Then I am going to explain to you why I brought
you up--

_Andre_--Not worth while, my dear father. There is no good in going
back to that, and I know quite well--

_Count_--On the contrary, you know nothing at all about the matter,
and you will please allow me to speak. It will be a consolation. You
are perfectly right as to things that have no common-sense in them;
and if I have brought you up after a certain manner, it is just
because I myself suffer from a different kind of education. _I_ was
brought up very severely; at twenty-two years I knew nothing of life.
I was born, I was kept hanging on at Vilsac, with my father and my
mother, who were saints on earth, with my great-uncle, who had the
gout, and with my tutor, who was an abbe. I was born with a
constitution like iron. I went hunting day by day for whole months, on
foot or on horseback. I ate my meals like an ogre. I rode every sort
of a horse, and I was a swordsman like St. George himself. As for
other things, my dear fellow, there was no use dreaming about them: I
had not a crown in my pocket. The other sex--well, I had heard it said
that there was a world of women somewhere, but I certainly did not
know where it was. One day my father asked me if I was willing to
marry, and I cried out, "Oh yes, yes!" with such an explosion that my
father himself could not help laughing--he who never laughed. I was
presented to a young girl, virtuous and beautiful; and I fell in love
with her with a passion which at first fairly frightened the delicate
and timid creature. Such was your mother, my dear Andre, and to her I
owe the two happiest years of my life; it is true that I owe to her
also my greatest grief, for at the end of those two years she died.
But it must be said, either to the blame or to the praise of nature,
that organizations such as mine are proof against the severest shocks.
At twenty-four years I found myself rich, a widower, free to do what I
pleased, and thrown--with a child a year old--into the midst of this
world called Paris, of which I knew nothing whatever. Ought I to have
condemned you to this sort of life that I had led at Vilsac, and which
had been for me so often an intolerable bore? No, I obeyed my real
nature. I gave you my qualities and my shortcomings, without reckoning
close