here again
his well known antipathy for the United States of America. Mark
Twain in the late 1800's felt obliged to rebut some of Bourget's
prejudice: "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us." D.W.]

The mixture of blood would there have dissolved the admirable
Anglo-Saxon energy which the struggle against a nature at once very rich
and very mutinous has exalted to such surprising splendor. It is not
necessary to ask those who are the victims of such an instinct to
comprehend the legal injustice. They only feel its ferocity. Napoleon
Chapron, rejected in several offers of marriage, thwarted in his plans,
humiliated under twenty trifling circumstances by the Colonel's former
companions, became a species of misanthrope. He lived, sustained by
a twofold desire, on the one hand to increase his fortune, and on
the other to wed a white woman. It was not until 1857, at the age of
thirty-five, that he realized the second of his two projects. In the
course of a trip to Europe, he became interested on the steamer in a
young English governess, who was returning from Canada, summoned home
by family troubles. He met her again in London. He helped her with such
delicacy in her distress, that he won her heart, and she consented to
become his wife. From that union were born, one year apart, Florent and
Lydia.

Lydia had cost her mother her life, at the moment when the War of
Secession jeoparded the fortune of Chapron, who, fortunately for him,
had, in his desire to enrich himself quickly, invested his money a
little on all sides. He was only partly ruined, but that semi-ruin
prevented him from returning to Europe, as he had intended. He
was compelled to remain in Alabama to repair that disaster, and he
succeeded, for at his death, in 1880, his children inherited more than
four hundred thousand dollars each. The incomparable father's devotion
had not limited itself to the building up of a large fortune. He had
the courage to deprive himself of the presence of the two beings whom he
adored, to spare them the humiliation of an American school, and he
sent them after their twelfth year to England, the boy to the Jesuits
of Beaumont, the girl to the convent of the Sacred Heart, at Roehampton.
After four years there, he sent them to Paris, Florent to Vaugirard,
Lydia to the Rue de Varenne, and just at the time that he had realized
the amount he considered requisite, when he was preparing to return to
live near them in a country without p