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Updated: July 16, 2025
The house had been to her a convent, but with more freedom, less enforced prayer, a retreat where she had lived beneath the eye of a pious old woman and the protection of her father, the only man she had ever known. This absolute solitude, necessitated from her birth by the apparent feebleness of her constitution, had been carefully maintained by Beauvouloir.
The gesture of satisfaction which escaped the count when the child's death was prophesied, suggested this speech to the bonesetter as the best means of saving the child at the moment. Beauvouloir now hastened to carry the infant back to its mother who had fainted, and he pointed to her condition reprovingly, to warn the count of the results of his violence.
To the questions of the countess, Beauvouloir, deeply touched, replied that he feared, as much as she did, an attempt to poison Etienne; but there was, he assured her, no danger as long as she nursed the child; and in future, when obliged to feed him, she must taste the food herself.
"I want to walk on the seashore, the air is so soft." Beauvouloir and his master walked in silence until they reached a spot where a line of light, coming from between the shutters of a fisherman's house, had furrowed the sea with a golden rivulet. "I know not how to express," said Etienne, addressing his companion, "the sensations that light, cast upon the water, excites in me.
Thus singular to say! the life which the hatred of a father had imposed on Etienne d'Herouville, paternal love had induced Beauvouloir to impose on Gabrielle.
Beauvouloir and Bertrand, the mother and the sleeping duke were all once more assembled. Same place, same scene, same actors! but this was funereal grief in place of the joys of motherhood; the night of death instead of the dawn of life. At that moment the storm, threatened by the melancholy moaning of the sea since sundown, suddenly burst forth.
These last words were accompanied by a significant pressure of the fingers. Disregarding the yellow flames flashing from the eyeholes of the count's mask, Beauvouloir uttered these words with the serious imperturbability of a man who intends to earn his money. "Ho! ho! bonesetter, you are leaving your old felt hat behind you," said Bertrand, as the two left the bedroom together.
Advancing with light steps, Etienne and Beauvouloir heard in that immense chateau no sound but the plaintive groans of the dying woman. Thus the very circumstances attending the birth of Etienne were renewed at the death of his mother. The same tempest, same agony, same dread of awaking the pitiless giant, who, on this occasion at least, slept soundly.
All other women would frighten and kill the heir of Herouville; and Gabrielle, so Beauvouloir argued, would perish by contact with any man in whom sentiments and external forms had not the virgin delicacy of those of Etienne. Certainly the poor physician had never dreamed of such a result; chance had brought it forward and seemed to ordain it.
Tete-Dieu!" cried the old man, rising to his feet and casting a flaming glance at his three companions, "I'll arm my soldiers once more, and, with Maximilien at my side, Normandy shall " "Sit down, my good seigneur," said Beauvouloir, uneasy at seeing the duke give way to an excitement that was dangerous to a convalescent.
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