child whom the grandmother had taken to live with her, her grandson
Silvere, the victim of family hatred and strife, whose head another
_gendarme_ shattered with a pistol shot, at the suppression of the
insurrectionary movement of 1851. She was always to be bespattered
with blood.

Felicite, meanwhile, had approached Charles, who was so engrossed with
his pictures that all these people did not disturb him.

"My darling, this gentleman is your father. Kiss him," she said.

And then they all occupied themselves with Charles. He was very
prettily dressed in a jacket and short trousers of black velvet,
braided with gold cord. Pale as a lily, he resembled in truth one of
those king's sons whose pictures he was cutting out, with his large,
light eyes and his shower of fair curls. But what especially struck
the attention at this moment was his resemblance to Aunt Dide; this
resemblance which had overleaped three generations, which had passed
from this withered centenarian's countenance, from these dead features
wasted by life, to this delicate child's face that was also as if
worn, aged, and wasted, through the wear of the race. Fronting each
other, the imbecile child of a deathlike beauty seemed the last of the
race of which she, forgotten by the world, was the ancestress.

Maxime bent over to press a kiss on the boy's forehead; and a chill
struck to his heart--this very beauty disquieted him; his uneasiness
grew in this chamber of madness, whence, it seemed to him, breathed a
secret horror come from the far-off past.

"How beautiful you are, my pet! Don't you love me a little?"