Here are some of the stories.
I knew that tall young fellow, Rene de Bourneval.
He was an agreeable man, though rather melancholy
and seemed prejudiced against everything, was very
skeptical, and he could with a word tear down social
hypocrisy. He would often say:
“There are no honorable men, or, at least, they
are only relatively so when compared with those lower
than themselves.”
He had two brothers, whom he never saw, the Messieurs
de Courcils. I always supposed they were by another
father, on account of the difference in the name.
I had frequently heard that the family had a strange
history, but did not know the details. As I took
a great liking to Rene we soon became intimate friends,
and one evening, when I had been dining with him alone,
I asked him, by chance: “Are you a son of
the first or second marriage?” He grew rather
pale, and then flushed, and did not speak for a few
moments; he was visibly embarrassed. Then he smiled
in the melancholy, gentle manner, which was peculiar
to him, and said:
“My dear friend, if it will not weary you, I
can give you some very strange particulars about my
life. I know that you are a sensible man, so
I do not fear that our friendship will suffer by my
I revelations; and should it suffer, I should not
care about having you for my friend any longer.
“My mother, Madame de Courcils, was a poor little,
timid woman, whom her husband had married for the
sake of her fortune, and her whole life was one of
martyrdom. Of a loving, timid, sensitive disposition,
she was constantly being ill-treated by the man who
ought to have been my father, one of those boors called
country gentlemen. A month after their marriage
he was living a licentious life and carrying on liaisons
with the wives and daughters of his tenants.
This did not prevent him from having three children
by his wife, that is, if you count me in. My mother
said nothing, and lived in that noisy house like a
little mouse. Set aside, unnoticed, nervous,
she looked at people with her bright, uneasy, restless
eyes, the eyes of some terrified creature which can
never shake off its fear. And yet she was pretty,
very pretty and fair, a pale blonde, as if her hair
had lost its color through her constant fear.
“Among the friends of Monsieur de Courcils who
constantly came to her chateau, there was an ex-cavalry
officer, a widower, a man who was feared, who was
at the same time tender and violent, capable of the
most determined resolves, Monsieur de Bourneval, whose
name I bear. He was a tall, thin man, with a
heavy black mustache. I am very like him.
He was a man who had read a great deal, and his ideas
were not like those of most of his class. His
great-grandmother had been a friend of J. J. Rousseau’s,
and one might have said that he had inherited something
of this ancestral connection. He knew the Contrat
Social, and the Nouvelle Heloise by heart, and all
those philosophical books which prepared in advance
the overthrow of our old usages, prejudices, superannuated
laws and imbecile morality.
