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Updated: June 2, 2025
Florent's grandfather was no other, indeed, than the Colonel Chapron who, as Napoleon desired information, swam the Dnieper on horseback, followed a Cossack on the opposite shore, hunted him like a stag, laid him across his saddle and took him back to the French camp.
When quite a child Lydia invented falsehoods as naturally as her brother spoke the truth.... Whosoever observed her would have perceived that those lies were all told to paint herself in a favorable light. The germ, too, of another defect was springing up within her a jealousy instinctive, irrational, almost wicked. She could not see a new plaything in Florent's hands without sulking immediately.
And see how one can speak of trouble without mistrusting it.... I have just been wicked," she continued, "for it is not their fault, neither Florent's nor hers, if there is a little negro blood in their veins, so much the more so as it is connected by the blood of a hero, and they are both perfectly educated, and what is better, perfectly good, and then I know very well that if there is a grand thought in this age it is to have proclaimed that truly all men are brothers."
Gordon Maitland, Lincoln's father, of an excellent family of New York, had been killed at the battle of Chancellorsville, during the same war which had ruined Florent's father in part. Mrs. Maitland, the poor daughter of a small rector of a Presbyterian church at Newport, and who had only married her husband for his money, had but one idea, when once a widow to go abroad. Whither?
Lisa, however, heard him, and was frightened by the implacable expression which had suddenly come over his face; and, recollecting the gentle look which he habitually wore, she judged him to be a hypocrite. Florent's hollow voice had brought Pauline's interest and delight to the highest pitch, and she fidgeted with pleasure on his knee. "But the man?" she exclaimed. "Go on about the man!"
But it was just this covert resistance on Florent's part which continually brought her back to the dream of marrying him. She realised that he lived in a loftier sphere than her own; and by becoming his wife she imagined that her vanity would reap no little satisfaction. She was greatly surprised when she learned the history of the man she loved.
Since he had begun flitting from one workshop to another there had been a constant succession of fresh expenses; money had gone in new clothes, in meals taken away from home, and in the payment of footings among fellow workmen. Florent's salary of eighteen hundred francs was no longer sufficient, and he was obliged to take a couple of pupils in the evenings.
Charvet, for his part, showed himself almost amiable; and whether he and the others knew anything of Florent's antecedents, they at all events indulged in no embarrassing allusions. "Did Manoury pay you in small change?" Logre asked Clemence. She answered affirmatively, and produced a roll of francs and another of two-franc pieces, and unwrapped them.
She had spoken in a lower voice, but too late. Moreover, even if Florent's sister could have heard those words, they would not have sufficed to heal the wound which the first ones had made in the most sensitive part of her 'amour propre'! "And I hesitated," said she to herself, "I thought of sparing her!"
He very soon learned to model ornament, and invented novelties; he had a gift for it. Five months after he was out of his apprenticeship as a finisher, he made acquaintance with Stidmann, the famous head of Florent's studios. Within twenty months Wenceslas was ahead of his master; but in thirty months the old maid's savings of sixteen years had melted entirely.
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