The boy for some while considered this. He considered, too, the enigmatic, just half-serious face of his father, the face that was at once the face of Michael and of Janicot. To accept things as they were, in this world which was now going to sleep as if the providing of food-stuffs and the fodder for people’s cattle were enough; and to have faith without reasoning over-logically about it: all these grown persons seemed enleagued to proffer him this stupid and unaspiring advice.
But Florian, at ten, had learned to humor the notions of his elders. So he said affably, if not quite without visible doubtfulness, “I see....”
EXPLICIT
It is gratifying to relate that, in a world wherein most moral lessons go to waste, young Florian duly honored the teaching of his dream. Therefore, as the boy grew toward maturity, he reduplicated in action all the crimes he had committed in fancy, and was appropriately grateful for his fore-knowledge that all would turn out well. But, when he had reached the thirty-sixth year of his living and the fourth chapter of this history, he then, at the conclusion of his talking with Marie-Claire Cazaio, decorously crossed himself, and he shrugged.
“Let sleeping ideals lie,” said Florian: “for over-high and over-earnest desires are inadvisable.”
Thereafter he rode, not into Acaire, but toward the Duardenez. He forded this river uneventfully; and four days later, at Storisende, was married, en cinquièmes noces, to Mademoiselle Louise de Nérac.
It is likewise pleasant to know that this couple lived together in an amity sufficient to result in the begetting of three daughters, and to permit, when the fourth Duke of Puysange most piously and edifyingly quitted this life, in the November of 1736, the survival of his widow.... The moral of all which seems to be that no word of this book, after the fourth chapter, need anybody regard with any least seriousness, unless you chance to be one of those discomfortable folk who contend that a fact is something which actually, but only, happens. A truth—so these will tell you,—does not merely “happen,” because truth is unfortuitous and immortal. This rather sweeping statement ought to be denied—outright—by none who believe that immortals go about our world invisibly.