Such, at this time, was the wretched state of the man, whose talents had
promised a fair and honourable career, had it not been the wretched
tendency of his mind, from boyhood upward, to pamper every unwholesome
and unhallowed feeling as a token of the exuberance of genius. De
Montaigne, though he touched as lightly as possible upon this dark
domestic calamity in his first communications with Maltravers, whose
conduct in that melancholy tale of crime and woe had, he conceived, been
stamped with generosity and feeling, still betrayed emotions that told
how much his peace had been embittered.

"I seek to console Teresa," said he, turning away his manly head, "and to
point out all the blessings yet left to her; but that brother so beloved,
from whom so much was so vainly expected,--still ever and ever, though
she strives to conceal it from me, this affliction comes back to her, and
poisons every thought! Oh, better a thousand times that he had died!
When reason, sense, almost the soul, are dead, how dark and fiend-like is
the life that remains behind! And if it should be in the blood--if
Teresa's children--dreadful thought!"

De Montaigne ceased, thoroughly overcome.

"Do not, my dear friend, so fearfully exaggerate your misfortune, great
as it is; Cesarini's disease evidently arose from no physical
conformation,--it was but the crisis, the development, of a
long-contracted malady of mind, passions morbidly indulged, the reasoning
faculty obstinately neglected; and yet too he may recover. The further
memory recedes from the shock he has sustained, the better the chance
that his mind will regain its tone."