ing 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 equipped that no one could recognize
her; to put her mother above the reach of necessity, and also to send to
poor Athanase, in a delicate manner, a sum of money,--which in our age
is to genius what in the middle ages was the charger and the coat of
mail that Rebe