That journey, of impressions as rapid and as fleeting as a reel of moving-pictures, leaving in Rafael’s mind a maze of names, buildings, paintings and cities, served to give greater breadth to his thinking, as well as added stimulus to his imagination.  Wider still became the gulf that separated him from the people and ideas he met in his common everyday life.  He felt a longing for the extraordinary, for the original, for the adventuresomeness of artistic youth; and political master of a county, heir of a feudal dominion virtually, he nevertheless would read the name of any writer or painter whatsoever with the superstitious respect of a rustic churl.  “A wretched, ruined lot who haven’t even a bed to die on,” his mother viewed such people; but Rafael nourished a secret envy for all who lived in that ideal world, which he was certain must be filled with pleasures and exciting things he had scarcely dared to dream of.  What would he not give to be a bohemian like the personages he met in the books of Murger, member of a merry band of “intellectuals,” leading a life of joy and proud devotion to higher things in a bourgeois age that knew only thirst for money and prejudice of class!  Talent for saying pretty things, for writing winged verses that soared like larks to heaven!  A garret underneath the roof, off there in Paris, in the Latin Quarter!  A Mimi poor but spiritual, who would love him, and—­between one kiss and another—­be able to discuss—­not the price of oranges, like the girls who followed him with tender eyes at home—­but serious “elevated” things!  In exchange for all that he would gladly have given his future deputyship and all the orchards he had inherited, which, though encumbered by mortgages not to mention moral debts left by the rascality of his father and grandfather—­still would bring him a tidy annuity for realizing his bohemian dreams.

Such preoccupations made life as a party leader, tied down to the petty interests of a constituency, quite unthinkable!  At the risk of angering his mother, he fled the Club, to court the solitude of the hills and fields.  There his imagination could range in greater freedom, peopling the roads, the meadows, the orange groves with creatures of his fancy, often conversing aloud with the heroines of some “grand passion,” carried on along the lines laid down by the latest novel he had read.

One afternoon toward the close of summer Rafael climbed the little mountain of San Salvador, which lies close to the city.  From the eminence he was fond of looking out over the vast domains of his family.  For all the inhabitants of that fertile plain were—­as don Andres said whenever he wished to emphasize the party’s greatness—­like so many cattle branded with the name of Brull.