She has been,
as it were, the mother of my intellect."
"I cannot bless her for that," said the baroness, with tears in her
eyes.
"Mamma!" cried Calyste, on whose forehead those hot tears fell, two
pearls of sorrowful motherhood, "mamma, don't weep! Just now, when I
wanted to do her a service, and search the country round, she said,
'It will make your mother so uneasy.'"
"Did she say that? Then I can forgive her many things," replied Fanny.
"Felicite thinks only of my good," continued Calyste. "She often
checks the lively, venturesome language of artists so as not to shake
me in a faith which is, though she knows it not, unshakable. She has
told me of the life in Paris of several young men of the highest
nobility coming from their provinces, as I might do,--leaving families
without fortune, but obtaining in Paris, by the power of their will
and their intellect, a great career. I can do what the Baron de
Rastignac, now a minister of State, has done. Felicite has taught me;
I read with her; she gives me lessons on the piano; she is teaching me
Italian; she has initiated me into a thousand social secrets, about
which no one in Guerande knows anything at all.
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