At length, one day, she said to me, "I must give over teaching you for a time, Henry, but good Monsieur la Tour will take the task till I can follow it again." And she put me under the charge of the minister of our little village, or rather, indeed, of the chateau, a good man as ever lived, who had always shown himself fond of me, and who now followed up, with zeal and kindness, that which she had so kindly and generously begun. The whole family, and every one in the immediate neighbourhood, were, as is well known, of the Reformed religion, and my cousin, the Baron de Blancford, was at that time absent with the Protestant army.
Shortly after, however, he returned, sent for, I believe, to be present at the birth of his first child, and great anxiety manifested itself in the household for several days. Fears were entertained for the safety of the lady, and great precautions taken; but at length I heard that the baroness had given birth to a child, and that she herself was proceeding favourably. With my heart full of joy and satisfaction, I ran to congratulate my cousin, thinking that there could be nothing but similar feelings in his own heart. He pushed me angrily away from him, however, exclaiming, "You fool, it is only a girl!"
Not understanding what he meant, or comprehending in the slightest degree why the birth of a girl should give him less satisfaction than if a son had been born, I ran to the room of Monsieur la Tour, and told him what had happened; and then it was, for the first time, that I was made to understand how great was the difference made by the customs of the world between two classes of beings naturally equal. A vague idea, too, of my own circumstances was also communicated to my mind, and from that time the change which had taken place, and which daily increased, in the deportment of my cousin's servants towards me, was marked, understood, and felt painfully. Two days after the birth of his daughter the baron again left the chateau, but he remained long enough to make me feel most bitterly that I was no longer the boy that he had sported with and loved in former years.
The lady soon recovered, and resumed her care of me without a change. She loved to have me with her; she loved to see me play with her infant; and, as month after month proceeded, the child's affection for me grew stronger and more strong, till there was none but her mother that she loved so well.
About a year and a half afterward a son was born; and then another; and from the birth of the first I found that I was no longer an object of consideration to any one except to the good clergyman, whose affection towards me seemed to increase as that of others diminished, and to the sweet lady, who never for a moment, in her love and care for others, forgot her love and care for me. A change had come over the whole household, however; the lover had long been forgotten in the husband, the husband had been forgotten in the man of pleasure. Whenever any short cessation of hostilities permitted him to visit the capital, it was in Paris that the Lord of Blancford's time was wholly spent, and at other periods his days were passed in the pleasures of other great towns, afar from the family which required his care and direction, and from the wife whose love he had cast away.
On her part, she showed not the slightest inclination to depart from his expressed wish that she would remain at the chateau of Blancford. She loved not great cities; she sought not to indemnify herself for her husband's neglect by following the same evil course in which he led: she enjoyed fully and entirely the pleasures of rural life, and found in the duties of a mother the greatest consolation and delight. Once in the course of the month, perhaps, she visited Bordeaux with the state becoming her rank and station, called upon some of the chief ladies of the city, and returned home after having remained there but a few hours. Very frequently, on these occasions, I accompanied her, and the kindness with which she mentioned me to all who were really good and estimable, seemed to bespeak for me their future protection and regard, although she never even hinted at such an object.
I was her companion almost always in her walks, too; and from her conversation I daily gained information upon subjects with which otherwise, most probably, I should never have been acquainted; for she took a delight in forming and expanding my mind, and, while she endeavoured to instil principles even more than knowledge, she illustrated for me the lessons she gave by facts and examples which often drew her on to farther explanations, and which certainly remained in my memory, storing it with much that was curious, interesting, and beautiful. Thus there was scarcely a circumstance which ever happened to me in after life which did not cause me to recollect some example from her instruction which might teach me to know the right from the wrong, to choose the good from the bad, or to return from the evil, when I had been led into wrong, by the shortest and most expeditious way.
In short, though she often fell into fits of musing, she seldom lost an opportunity of giving my mind improvement. If I fixed upon a wild flower, she told me its nature and its qualities; if I watched a passing cloud, she explained to me how sweet and beneficial to the earth's surface are the light vapours that float gently over it, descending in light rain to render everything fertile and productive; and she would explain to me, as well as she could, what were the beneficial effects produced by winds and storms that seemed to my imagination tremendous, pointing still to the all-powerful hand of Providence, shaping still the events of this world with never-erring wisdom directing never-failing might.
From her conversation, from her train of thought, my mind took the peculiar turn which it ever after retained; and even to the present day, after scenes of peril, and danger, and activity; after having gained, by sad experience, knowledge of the world, and become hackneyed and keen in the wisdom of the earth, many of the words that she spoke to me, many of the counsels that she gave, come back upon my ear in all the fresh sweetness of the tones in which it was originally spoken, and I feel myself better, happier, more contented, when thus dwell with her for a moment in the wide tracts of memory, than I do when fulfilling any of the ordinary duties of my state and station.
What she herself could not do to improve my mind the good priest did; he applied himself to teach me sciences; to read other languages than my own, both dead and living; to argue by rule; to write my native language with accuracy; to calculate arithmetically; and to do all, in short, that he himself could do, which was more, perhaps, than my after fate required. It was some years, of course, ere I gained much facility in everything, but ere four years had passed after my cousin's marriage I had become quite a different being. The formidable obstacles that await us at the entrance of every science had given way, and during the following year, which was the fourteenth of my age, I made greater progress than I had done in any other. I had now acquired a taste for the poetry which had descended to us from other days; and from that high and ennobling source I drank long, deep draughts of pure and unmingled delight. I found, too, that there were works of infinite value, full of fancy and of wit, full of instruction and amusement, in other languages besides either French, or Greek, or Latin; and, almost unaided--for my good preceptor knew little of that tongue himself--I made myself a tolerable master of the Italian language, and felt like one who has suddenly discovered a treasure when the works of Dante and Boccaccio, and the newer poems of Tasso, fell into my hands.