On the great bed, where happiness never came, he looked for his
beloved, and scarcely found her, so emaciated was she. White as her

own laces, with scarcely a breath left, she gathered up all her
strength to clasp Etienne's hand, and to give him her whole soul, as

heretofore, in a look. Chaverny had bequeathed to her all his life in
a last farewell. Beauvouloir and Bertrand, the mother and the sleeping

duke were all once more assembled. Same place, same scene, same
actors! but this was funereal grief in place of the joys of

motherhood; the night of death instead of the dawn of life. At that
moment the storm, threatened by the melancholy moaning of the sea

since sundown, suddenly burst forth.
"Dear flower of my life!" said the mother, kissing her son. "You were

taken from my bosom in the midst of a tempest, and in a tempest I am
taken from you. Between these storms all life has been stormy to me,

except the hours I have spent with you. This is my last joy, mingled
with my last pangs. Adieu, my only love! adieu, dear image of two

souls that will soon be reunited! Adieu, my only joy--pure joy! adieu,
my own beloved!"

"Let me follow thee!" cried Etienne.
"It would be your better fate!" she said, two tears rolling down her

livid cheeks; for, as in former days, her eyes seemed to read the
future. "Did any one see him?" she asked of the two men.

At this instant the duke turned in his bed; they all trembled.
"Even my last joy is mingled with pain," murmured the duchess. "Take

him away! take him away!"
"Mother, I would rather see you a moment longer and die!" said the

poor lad, as he fainted by her side.
At a sign from the duchess, Bertrand took Etienne in his arms, and,

showing him for the last time to his mother, who kissed him with a
last look, he turned to carry him away, awaiting the final order of

the dying mother.
"Love him well!" she said to the physician and Bertrand; "he has no

protectors but you and Heaven."
Prompted by an instinct which never misleads a mother, she had felt

the pity of the old retainer for the eldest son of a house, for which
his veneration was only comparable to that of the Jews for their Holy

City, Jerusalem. As for Beauvouloir, the compact between himself and
the duchess had long been signed. The two servitors, deeply moved to

see their mistress forced to bequeath her noble child to none but
themselves, promised by a solemngesture to be the providence of their

young master, and the mother had faith in that gesture.
The duchess died towards morning, mourned by the servants of the

household, who, for all comment, were heard to say beside her grave,
"She was a comely woman, sent from Paradise."

Etienne's sorrow was the most intense, the most lasting of sorrows,
and wholly silent. He wandered no more among his rocks; he felt no

strength to read or sing. He spent whole days crouched in the crevice
of a rock, caring nought for the inclemency of the weather,

motionless, fastened to the granite like the lichen that grew upon it;
weeping seldom, lost in one sole thought, immense, infinite as the

ocean, and, like that ocean, taking a thousand forms,--terrible,
tempestuous, tender, calm. It was more than sorrow; it was a new

existence, an irrevocable destiny, dooming this innocent creature to
smile no more. There are pangs which, like a drop of blood cast into

flowing water, stain the whole current instantly. The stream, renewed
from its source, restores the purity of its surface; but with Etienne

the source itself was polluted, and each new current brought its own
gall.

Bertrand, in his old age, had retained the superintendence of the
stables, so as not to lose the habit of authority in the household.

His house was not far from that of Etienne, so that he was ever at
hand to watch over the youth with the persistentaffection and simple

wiliness characteristic of old soldiers. He checked his roughness when
speaking to the poor lad; softly he walked in rainy weather to fetch

him from his reverie in his crevice to the house. He put his pride
into filling the mother's place, so that her child might find, if not

her love, at least the same attentions. This pity resembled
tenderness. Etienne bore, without complaint or resistance, these

attentions of the old retainer, but too many links were now broken
between the hated child and other creatures to admit of any keen

affection at present in his heart. Mechanically he allowed himself to
be protected; he became, as it were, an intermediary creature between

man and plant, or, perhaps one might say, between man and God. To what
shall we compare a being to whom all social laws, all the false

sentiments of the world were unknown, and who kept his ravishing
innocence by obeying nought but the instincts of his heart?

Nevertheless, in spite of his sombre melancholy, he came to feel the
need of loving, of finding another mother, another soul for his soul.

But, separated from civilization by an iron wall, it was well-nigh
impossible to meet with a being who had flowered like himself.

Instinctively seeking another self to whom to confide his thoughts and
whose life might blend with his life, he ended in sympathizing with

his Ocean. The sea became to him a living, thinking being. Always in
presence of that vast creation, the hidden marvels of which contrast

so grandly with those of earth, he discovered the meaning of many
mysteries. Familiar from his cradle with the infinitude of those

liquid fields, the sea and the sky taught him many poems. To him, all
was variety in that vast picture so monotonous to some. Like other men

whose souls dominate their bodies, he had a piercing sight which could
reach to enormous distances and seize, with admirable ease and without

fatigue, the fleeting tints of the clouds, the passing shimmer of the
waters. On days of perfect stillness his eyes could see the manifold

tints of the ocean, which to him, like the face of a woman, had its
physiognomy, its smiles, ideas, caprices; there green and sombre; here

smiling and azure; sometimes uniting its brilliant lines with the hazy
gleams of the horizon, or again, softly swaying beneath the orange-

tinted heavens. For him all-glorious fetes were celebrated at sundown
when the star of day poured its red colors on the waves in a crimson

flood. For him the sea was gay and sparkling and spirited when it
quivered in repeating the noonday light from a thousand dazzling

facets; to him it revealed its wondrousmelancholy; it made him weep
whenever, calm or sad, it reflected the dun-gray sky surcharged with

clouds. He had learned the mute language of that vast creation. The
flux and reflux of its waters were to him a melodious breathing which

uttered in his ear a sentiment; he felt and comprehended its inward
meaning. No mariner, no man of science, could have predicted better

than he the slightest wrath of the ocean, the faintest change on that
vast face. By the manner of the waves as they rose and died away upon

the shore, he could foreseetempests, surges, squalls, the height of
tides, or calms. When night had spread its veil upon the sky, he still

could see the sea in its twilightmystery, and talk with it. At all
times he shared its fecund life, feeling in his soul the tempest when

it was angry; breathing its rage in its hissing breath; running with
its waves as they broke in a thousand liquid fringes upon the rocks.

He felt himself intrepid, free, and terrible as the sea itself; like
it, he bounded and fell back; he kept its solemn silence; he copied

its sudden pause. In short, he had wedded the sea; it was now his
confidant, his friend. In the morning when he crossed the glowing

sands of the beach and came upon his rocks, he divined the temper of
the ocean from a single glance; he could see landscapes on its

surface; he hovered above the face of the waters, like an angel coming
down from heaven. When the joyous, mischievous white mists cast their

gossamer before him, like a veil before the face of a bride, he
followed their undulations and caprices with the joy of a lover. His

thought, married with that grand expression of the divine thought,
consoled him in his solitude, and the thousand outlooks of his soul

peopled its desert with glorious fantasies. He ended at last by
divining in the motions of the sea its close communion with the

celestialsystem; he perceived nature in its harmonious whole, from
the blade of grass to the wandering stars which seek, like seeds

driven by the wind, to plant themselves in ether.
Pure as an angel, virgin of those ideas which degrade mankind, naive

as a child, he lived like a sea-bird, a gull, or a flower, prodigal of
the treasures of poeticimagination, and possessed of a divine

knowledge, the fruitfulextent of which he contemplated in solitude.
Incredible mingling of two creations! sometimes he rose to God in

prayer; sometimes he descended, humble and resigned, to the quiet
happiness of animals. To him the stars were the flowers of night, the

birds his friends, the sun was a father. Everywhere he found the soul
of his mother; often he saw her in the clouds; he spoke to her; they

communicated, veritably, by celestial visions; on certain days he
could hear her voice and see her smile; in short, there were days when

he had not lost her. God seemed to have given him the power of the
hermits of old, to have endowed him with some perfected inner senses

which penetrated to the spirit of all things. Unknown moral forces
enabled him to go farther than other men into the secrets of the