“Marry! at my age!” he said, casting on his mother one of those looks which melt the arguments of mothers.  “Am I to live without my beautiful fond loves?  Must I never tremble or throb or fear or gasp, or lie beneath implacable looks and soften them?  Am I never to know beauty in its freedom, the fantasy of the soul, the clouds that course through the azure of happiness, which the breath of pleasure dissipates?  Ah! shall I never wander in those sweet by-paths moist with dew; never stand beneath the drenching of a gutter and not know it rains, like those lovers seen by Diderot; never take, like the Duc de Lorraine, a live coal in my hand?  Are there no silken ladders for me, no rotten trellises to cling to and not fall?  Shall I know nothing of woman but conjugal submission; nothing of love but the flame of its lamp-wick?  Are my longings to be satisfied before they are roused?  Must I live out my days deprived of that madness of the heart that makes a man and his power?  Would you make me a married monk?  No!  I have eaten of the fruit of Parisian civilization.  Do you not see that you have, by the ignorant morals of this family, prepared the fire that consumes me, that will consume me utterly, unless I can adore the divineness I see everywhere,—­in those sands gleaming in the sun, in the green foliage, in all the women, beautiful, noble, elegant, pictured in the books and in the poems I have read with Camille?  Alas! there is but one such woman in Guerande, and it is you, my mother!  The birds of my beautiful dream, they come from Paris, they fly from the pages of Scott, of Byron,—­Parisina, Effie, Minna! yes, and that royal duchess, whom I saw on the moors among the furze and the ferns, whose very aspect sent the blood to my heart.”

The baroness saw these thoughts flaming in the eyes of her son, clearer, more beautiful, more living than art can tell to those who read them.  She grasped them rapidly, flung to her as they were in glances like arrows from an upset quiver.  Without having read Beaumarchais, she felt, as other women would have felt, that it would be a crime to marry Calyste.

“Oh! my child!” she said, taking him in her arms, and kissing the beautiful hair that was still hers, “marry whom you will, and when you will, but be happy!  My part in life is not to hamper you.”

Mariotte came to lay the table.  Gasselin was out exercising Calyste’s horse, which the youth had not mounted for two months.  The three women, mother, aunt, and Mariotte, shared in the tender feminine wiliness, which taught them to make much of Calyste when he dined at home.  Breton plainness fought against Parisian luxury, now brought to the very doors of Guerande.  Mariotte endeavored to wean her young master from the accomplished service of Camille Maupin’s kitchen, just as his mother and aunt strove to hold him in the net of their tenderness and render all comparison impossible.

“There’s a salmon-trout for dinner, Monsieur Calyste, and snipe, and pancakes such as I know you can’t get anywhere but here,” said Mariotte, with a sly, triumphant look as she smoothed the cloth, a cascade of snow.