As chance had it, this tutor was a true priest, one of
those ecclesiastics cut out to become cardinals in France, or Borgias
beneath the tiara. He taught the child in three years what he might
have learned at college in ten. Then the great man, by name the Abbe
de Maronis, completed the education of his pupil by making him study
civilization under all its aspects: he nourished him on his
experience, led him little into churches, which at that time were
closed; introduced him sometimes behind the scenes of theatres, more
often into the houses of courtesans; he exhibited human emotions to
him one by one; taught him politics in the drawing-rooms, where they
simmered at the time, explained to him the machinery of government,
and endeavored out of attraction towards a fine nature, deserted, yet
rich in promise, virilely to replace a mother: is not the Church the
mother of orphans? The pupil was responsive to so much care. The
worthy priest died in 1812, a bishop, with the satisfaction of having
left in this world a child whose heart and mind were so well moulded
that he could outwit a man of forty. Who would have expected to have
found a heart of bronze, a brain of steel, beneath external traits as
seductive as ever the old painters, those naive artists, had given to
the serpent in the terrestrial paradise? Nor was that all. In
addition, the good-natured prelate had procured for the child of his
choice certain acquaintances in the best Parisian society, which might
equal in value, in the young man's hand, another hundred thousand
invested livres.
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