that he won her heart, and she consented to become his wife. From that
union were born, one year apart, Florent and Lydia.

Lydia had cost her mother her life, at the moment when the War of
Secession jeoparded the fortune of Chapron, who, fortunately for him,
had, in his desire to enrich himself quickly, invested his money a little
on all sides. He was only partly ruined, but that semi-ruin prevented
him from returning to Europe, as he had intended. He was compelled to
remain in Alabama to repair that disaster, and he succeeded, for at his
death, in 1880, his children inherited more than four hundred thousand
dollars each. The incomparable father's devotion had not limited itself
to the building up of a large fortune. He had the courage to deprive
himself of the presence of the two beings whom he adored, to spare them
the humiliation of an American school, and he sent them after their
twelfth year to England, the boy to the Jesuits of Beaumont, the girl to
the convent of the Sacred Heart, at Roehampton. After four years there,
he sent them to Paris, Florent to Vaugirard, Lydia to the Rue de Varenne,
and just at the time that he had realized the amount he considered
requisite, when he was preparing to return to live near them in a country
without prejudices, a stroke of apoplexy took him off suddenly. The
double wear of toil and care had told upon one of those organisms which
the mixture of the black and white races often produces, athletic in
appearance, but of a very keen sensibility, in which the vital resistance
is not in proportion to the muscular vigor.

Whatever care the man, so deeply grieved by the blemish upon his birth,
had taken to preserve his children from a similar experience, he had not
been able to do so, and soon after his son entered Beaumont his trials
began. The few boys with whom Florent was thrown in contact, in the
hotels or in his walks, during his sojourn in America, had already made