than those I had long worn in Paris. If I ran from one end of the room
to the other to pick up her handkerchief, she took it with the cold
thanks a lady gives to her footman. Driven to watch her to find if
there were any soft spot where I could fasten the rootlets of
affection, I came to see her as she was,--a tall, spare woman, given
to cards, egotistical and insolent, like all the Listomeres, who count
insolence as part of their dowry. She saw nothing in life except
duties to be fulfilled. All cold women whom I have known made, as she
did, a religion of duty; she received our homage as a priest receives
the incense of the mass. My elder brother appeared to absorb the
trifling sentiment of maternity which was in her nature. She stabbed
us constantly with her sharp irony,--the weapon of those who have no
heart,--and which she used against us, who could make her no reply.

Notwithstanding these thorny hindrances, the instinctive sentiments
have so many roots, the religious fear inspired by a mother whom it is
dangerous to displease holds by so many threads, that the sublime
mistake--if I may so call it--of our love for our mother lasted until
the day, much later in our lives, when we judged her finally. This
terrible despotism drove from my mind all thoughts of the voluptuous
enjoyments I had dreamed of finding at Tours. In despair I took refuge
in my father's library, where I set myself to read every book I did
not know. These long periods of hard study saved me from contact with
my mother; but they aggravated the dangers of my moral condition.
Sometimes my eldest sister--she who afterwards married our cousin, the
Marquis de Listomere--tried to comfort me, without, however, being
able to calm the irritation to which I was a victim. I desired to die.

Great events, of which I knew nothing, were then in preparation. The
Duc d'Angouleme, who had left Bordeaux to join Louis XVIII. in Paris,