CHAPTER I.
"A BALEFUL AFFECTION." All those who, like ourselves, knew Raoul de Trecoeur during his early youth, believed that he was destined to great fame.

He had received quite remarkable gifts from nature; there are left from him two or three sketches and a few hundred verses that promised a master; but he was very rich, and had been very badly brought up; he soon gave himself up to dilettanteism.

A perfect stranger, like most men of his generation, to the sentiment of duty, he permitted himself to be recklessly carried away by his instincts, which, fortunately for others, were more ardent than hurtful.

Therefore was he generally pitied when he died, in the flower of his age, for having loved and enjoyed immoderately everything that he thought pleasant.
The poor fellow, they said, never did any harm but to himself; which, in point of fact, was not the exact truth.

Trecoeur had married, at the age of twenty-five, his cousin, Clotilde Andree de Pers, a modest and graceful person who had of the world nothing but its elegance.