Calyste, that splendid offspring of the oldest Breton race and the noblest Irish blood, had been nurtured by his mother with the utmost care.  Until the moment when the baroness made over the training of him to the rector of Guerande, she was certain that no impure word, no evil thought had sullied the ears or entered the mind of her precious son.  After nursing him at her bosom, giving him her own life twice, as it were, after guiding his footsteps as a little child, the mother had put him with all his virgin innocence into the hands of the pastor, who, out of true reverence for the family, had promised to give him a thorough and Christian education.  Calyste thenceforth received the instruction which the abbe himself had received at the Seminary.  The baroness taught him English, and a teacher of mathematics was found, not without difficulty, among the employes at Saint-Nazaire.  Calyste was therefore necessarily ignorant of modern literature, and the advance and present progress of the sciences.  His education had been limited to geography and the circumspect history of a young ladies’ boarding-school, the Latin and Greek of seminaries, the literature of the dead languages, and to a very restricted choice of French writers.  When, at sixteen, he began what the Abbe Grimont called his philosophy, he was neither more nor less than what he was when Fanny placed him in the abbe’s hands.  The Church had proved as maternal as the mother.  Without being over-pious or ridiculous, the idolized young lad was a fervent Catholic.

For this son, so noble, so innocent, the baroness desired to provide a happy life in obscurity.  She expected to inherit some property, two or three thousand pounds sterling, from an aunt.  This sum, joined to the small present fortune of the Guenics, might enable her to find a wife for Calyste, who would bring him twelve or even fifteen thousand francs a year.  Charlotte de Kergarouet, with her aunt’s fortune, a rich Irish girl, or any other good heiress would have suited the baroness, who seemed indifferent as to choice.  She was ignorant of love, having never known it, and, like all the other persons grouped about her, she saw nothing in marriage but a means of fortune.  Passion was an unknown thing to these Catholic souls, these old people exclusively concerned about salvation, God, the king, and their property.  No one should be surprised, therefore, at the foreboding thoughts which accompanied the wounded feelings of the mother, who lived as much for the future interests of her son as by her love for him.  If the young household would only listen to wisdom, she thought, the coming generation of the du Guenics, by enduring privations, and saving, as people do save in the provinces, would be able to buy back their estates and recover, in the end, the lustre of wealth.  The baroness prayed for a long age that she might see the dawn of this prosperous era.  Mademoiselle du Guenic had understood and fully adopted this hope which Mademoiselle des Touches now threatened to overthrow.