The boy appeared to be of a strong and robust constitution, and his mother's dowry would go to swell the revenues of the Champdoce family.

He made his recent loss, too, the pretext for further retrenchments and economies.
Norbert was brought up exactly as a farmer's son would have been.

Every morning he started off to work, carrying his day's provisions in a basket slung upon his back.

As he grew older, he was taught to sow and reap, to estimate the value of a standing crop at a glance, and, last but not least, to drive a hard bargain.

For a long time the Duke debated the expediency of permitting his son to be taught to read or write; and if he did so at last, it was owing to some severe remarks by the parish priest upon the day on which Norbert took the sacrament for the first time.
All went on well and smoothly until the day when Norbert, on his sixteenth birthday, accompanied his father to Poitiers for the first time.
At sixteen years of age, Louis Norbert de Champdoce looked fully twenty, and was as handsome a youth as could be seen for miles round.