The dowager, a tender-hearted, pious woman, sitting between God and
her vidame, a model of grace and sweetness, but gifted with that
well-bred persistency which triumphs in the long run, had longed to
preserve for her grandson the beautiful illusions of life, and had
therefore brought him up in the highest principles; she instilled into
him her own delicacy of feeling and made him, to outward appearance, a
timid man, if not a fool. The sensibilities of the young fellow,
preserved pure, were not worn by contact without; he remained so
chaste, so scrupulous, that he was keenly offended by actions and
maxims to which the world attached no consequence. Ashamed of this
susceptibility, he forced himself to conceal it under a false
hardihood; but he suffered in secret, all the while scoffing with
others at the things he reverenced.
It came to pass that he was deceived; because, in accordance with a
not uncommon whim of destiny, he, a man of gentle melancholy, and
spiritual in love, encountered in the object of his first passion a
woman who held in horror all German sentimentalism. The young man, in
consequence, distrusted himself, became dreamy, absorbed in his
griefs, complaining of not being understood. Then, as we desire all
the more violently the things we find difficult to obtain, he
continued to adore women with that ingenuous tenderness and feline
delicacy the secret of which belongs to women themselves, who may,
perhaps, prefer to keep the monopoly of it.
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