Come to me; I will try to make you
forget my cruelty; I will cherish you for all that I have lost.
Etienne, you are the Duc de Nivron, and you will be, after me, the Duc
d'Herouville, peer of France, knight of the Orders and of the Golden
Fleece, captain of a hundred men-at-arms, grand-bailiff of Bessin,
Governor of Normandy, lord of twenty-seven domains counting sixty-nine
steeples, Marquis de Saint-Sever. You shall take to wife the daughter
of a prince. Would you have me die of grief? Come! come to me! or here
I kneel until I see you. Your old father prays you, he humbles himself
before his child as before God himself."
The hated son paid no heed to this language bristling with social
ideas and vanities he did not comprehend; his soul remained under the
impressions of unconquerable terror. He was silent, suffering great
agony. Towards evening the old seigneur, after exhausting all formulas
of language, all resources of entreaty, all repentant promises, was
overcome by a sort of religious contrition. He knelt down upon the
sand and made a vow:--
"I swear to build a chapel to Saint-Jean and Saint-Etienne, the
patrons of my wife and son, and to found one hundred masses in honor
of the Virgin, if God and the saints will restore to me the affection
of my son, the Duc de Nivron, here present.
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