Lucilio too had his share in this family happiness, which caused him to forget to some extent the solitude of his heart and his ghastly future.
The stern yet simple-minded philosopher was not yet too old to love; but he thought that he ought not to aspire to it, and, after having felt its ardent flames more than once, he feared that he might fall into some mere sensual connection, in which his heart would not be included. He resigned himself therefore to live by devotion to others and to abandon all illusions finally and absolutely.
He who had endured imprisonment, exile and poverty, and had undergone martyrdom, appealed to himself to conquer the craving for happiness as he had conquered all the rest, and he always emerged tranquillized and triumphant from these meditations; but triumphant as one is after the torture: a blending of feverish excitement and prostration, on one side the heart, on the other the body; a life whose equilibrium is destroyed and in which the mind can no longer tell in what sort of a world it is.
And yet Lucilio exaggerated his misfortune to himself. He was beloved, not by a mind of rare intelligence—that is what he needed, at least he thought so, to reconcile himself to his tragic destiny—but by a heart.
Before his learning and his genius, Mercedes was like a rose before the sun. She drank in its rays without understanding them; but she was enamored of his gentleness, his courage and his virtue, and her loving heart was prostrate before him. She did not resist the sentiment, but cherished it as a religious duty; she said nothing, however, because she had more fear than hope.
We must not forget to mention in its place a little domestic revolution that occurred at the château of Briantes a few days after Monsieur de Beuvre's departure; for the importance of this seemingly trivial incident became grievously manifest later to the too happy inmates of the château.
Although the younger of the beaux messieurs de Bois-Doré was not always the more child-like, Mario sometimes displayed a mischievous tendency, especially when, as Adamas expressed it, "he and the little madame had had their heads together." He was too kind-hearted and affectionate ever to torment animals or human beings; he never had occasion to reproach himself for pulling Fleurial's ear or addressing an unpleasant word to Clindor; but inanimate things did not always inspire in him the respect that certain of them inspired in the marquis. Of this number were the little statues from the romance of Astrée, which embellished the gardens of Isaure and the famous labyrinth, and the den of old Mandrague, by which he had been much entertained at first, but which gradually began to pall upon him as playthings too utterly devoid of life.
One day, when he was trying a great wooden sabre which Aristandre had carved for him, he pretended to threaten with it one of the stucco personages representing the disguised Filandre, that is to say the pretended Filandre, because, as everyone knows, resembling his sister Callirée so closely that it was impossible to distinguish them, he donned female clothes in order to obtain admission to the private apartments of the nymph he loved.
The shepherd was represented in that female disguise, and the artist employed to mould the figures, trusting to the explicitly alleged resemblance of the brother and sister, had ventured to spare his imagination some labor by employing the same model for the two figures facing each other, with those of Amidor, Daphnis, etc., in the rond-point of verdure, called the grove of the errors of love.
So, to distinguish the brother from the sister, the marquis had written on the pedestal of the brother a fragment of the long monologue which begins thus: "O vainglorious Filandre, who can ever pardon thy fault, etc.?"