All those who, like ourselves, knew Raoul de Trecoeur during his early
youth, believed that he was destined to great fame. He had received quite
remarkable gifts from nature; there are left from him two or three
sketches and a few hundred verses that promised a master; but he was very
rich, and had been very badly brought up; he soon gave himself up to
dilettanteism. A perfect stranger, like most men of his generation, to the
sentiment of duty, he permitted himself to be recklessly carried away by
his instincts, which, fortunately for others, were more ardent than
hurtful. Therefore was he generally pitied when he died, in the flower of
his age, for having loved and enjoyed immoderately everything that he
thought pleasant.

The poor fellow, they said, never did any harm but to himself; which, in
point of fact, was not the exact truth. Trecoeur had married, at the age
of twenty-five, his cousin, Clotilde Andree de Pers, a modest and graceful
person who had of the world nothing but its elegance. Madame de Trecoeur
had lived with her husband in an atmosphere of unhealthy storms, where she
felt out of place, and, as it were, degraded. He tormented her with his
remorse almost as much as he did with his faults. He looked upon her, and
justly, as an angel, and wept at her feet when he had betrayed her,
lamenting that he was unworthy of her; that he was the victim of his
temperament, and that he had been born in a faithless age. He threatened
once to kill himself in his wife's boudoir if she did not forgive him; she
forgave him, of course. All this dramatic action disturbed Clotilde in her
resigned existence. She would have preferred that her misery should have
been more quiet and less declamatory.

All the friends of her husband had been in love with her, and had built