relatives in his native land, on dying, left his entire fortune to that
son, whom he had christened Napoleon. While he lived, not one of his
neighbors dared to treat the young man differently from the way in which
his father treated him.

But it was not the same when the prestige of the Emperor's soldier was
not there to protect the boy against that aversion to race which is
morally a prejudice, but socially interprets an instinct of preservation
of infallible surety. The United States has grown only on that
condition.

[Those familiar with the works of Bourget will recognize here again
his well known antipathy for the United States of America. Mark
Twain in the late 1800's felt obliged to rebut some of Bourget's
prejudice: "What Paul Bourget thinks of us." D.W.]

The mixture of blood would there have dissolved the admirable Anglo-Saxon
energy which the struggle against a nature at once very rich and very
mutinous has exalted to such surprising splendor. It is not necessary to
ask those who are the victims of such an instinct to comprehend the legal
injustice. They only feel its ferocity. Napoleon Chapron, rejected in
several offers of marriage, thwarted in his plans, humiliated under
twenty trifling circumstances by the Colonel's former companions, became
a species of misanthrope. He lived, sustained by a twofold desire, on
the one hand to increase his fortune, and on the other to wed a white
woman. It was not until 1857, at the age of thirty-five, that he
realized the second of his two projects. In the course of a trip to
Europe, he became interested on the steamer in a young English governess,
who was returning from Canada, summoned home by family troubles. He met
her again in London. He helped her with such delicacy in her distress,