Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/183

 the official hour for leave-taking, and on the doorstep they said to each other:

“He is not strong!” “He is very much downcast!” “Will he get over it?”

The next day, Savinien wrote his mother a general confession of twenty-two pages. After having wept for a whole day, Madame de Portenduère first wrote to her son, promising to get him out of prison: then to the Comtes de Portenduère and De Kergarouët.

The letters that the curé had just been reading and that the poor mother was holding in her hands, wet with tears, had arrived that same morning and had broken her heart.

TO MADAME DE PORTENDUÈRE.

“Paris, September, 1829.

“MADAME,

“You cannot doubt the interest the admiral and I take in your troubles. What you write to Monsieur de Kergarouët grieves me all the more as my house was your son’s; we were proud of him. If Savinien had had more confidence in the admiral we would have taken him with us, and he would already have been suitably placed; but he said nothing to us, the unhappy boy! The admiral could not pay a hundred thousand francs; he is in debt himself and has involved himself for me who knew nothing of his pecuniary position. He is all the more grieved in that Savinien has, for the moment, tied our hands by allowing himself to be arrested. If my handsome nephew had not had I cannot say how foolish a passion for me which stifled the voice of the kinship in the pride of the lover, we would have made him travel in Germany whilst his affairs were being settled here. Monsieur de Kergarouët