Up to his twentieth year, he alternated between severe study and long journeys, in company with his father, and could thus complete his extraordinary aesthetic education under paternal direction, without the restrictions and constraints imposed by tutors.

And it was to his father that he owed his taste for everything pertaining to art, his passionate cult of the Beautiful, his paradoxical disdain of prejudice, and his keen appetite for the sensuous.
That father, who had grown up in the midst of the last expiring splendours of the Bourbon court of Naples, understood life on a large scale, was profoundly initiated into all the arts of the voluptuary, combined with a certain Byronic leaning towards fantastic romanticism.
His marriage had occurred under _quasi_ tragic circumstances, the finale of a mad passion; then, after disturbing and undermining the conjugal peace in every possible fashion, he had separated from his wife, and, keeping his son always with him, had travelled about the whole of Europe.
Andrea's education had thus been a living one; that is to say, derived less from books than from the study of life as he had seen it.

His mind was corrupted not only by over-refined culture, but also by actual experiments, and in him curiosity grew keener in proportion as his knowledge grew wider.

From the beginning, he had ever been prodigal of his powers, for the great nervous force with which nature had endowed him was inexhaustible in providing him with the treasures he dispensed so lavishly.

But the expansion of that energy caused in him the destruction of another force: the moral one, which his own father had not scrupled to repress in him.