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misfortune of the generations placed between those which knew nothing and those which will know just enough : they know too much.
    Lhéry and his wife could not understand the misfortunes of this situation. They refused even to imagine them, and having no conception of any other felicities than those which they could confer, they boasted artlessly of having the power to put Bénédict’s ennui to flight : according to them it could be done by a good farm, a pretty farmer-maid, and a dowry of two hundred thousand francs in cash with which to begin housekeeping. But Bénédict was insensible to these flattering marks of their affection. Money aroused in him profound contempt, the enthusiastic, exaggerated contempt of a generation of young men often too quick to change their principles and to bend a converted knee before the god of the universe. Bénédict felt that he was consumed by a secret ambition ; but it was not that ; it was the ambition of his age, of the things which flatter the self-esteem in a nobler way.
    He did not as yet know the special object of his vague and painful expectation. He had thought several times that he recognized it in the vivid caprices of his imagination. Those caprices had vanished without bringing him any lasting enjoyment. Now, he was constantlyconscious of it as of a pitiless pain confined in his breast, and it had never tortured him so cruelly as when he least knew what use to make of it. Ennui, that horrible disease which is more prevalent at the present time than at any other period in the history of society, had attacked Bénédict’s destiny in its bloom ; it stretched out like a black cloud over his whole future. It had already blighted the most priceless faculty of his age—hope.
    At Paris, solitude had disgusted him. Although he considered it far preferable to society, it was too dismal in his little student’s chamber, too dangerous for faculties so active as his. His health had suffered, and his kind-hearted relations, in dismay, had sent for him to return. He had been at home a month, and his complexion had already recovered the ruddy coloring of health; but his heart was more perturbed than ever. The poetic atmosphere of the fields, to which he was so susceptible, excited to delirium the intensity of the un-fathomed cravings which were consuming him. His home life, always so beneficent and soothing at first, whenever he made a trial of it, had already become more tedious than ever. He felt no inclination for Athénaïs. She was too far below the chimeras of his imagination, and the idea of settling down among the extravagant or puerile habits which were conjoined and contrasted in his family was hateful to him. His heart opened, it is true, to affection and gratitude ; but those sentiments were to him a source of constant combats and remorse. He could not refrain from reflections pitiless and cruel in their irony, at sight of all the mean and trivial struggles amid which he lived, of that mixture of parsimony and extravagance which makes the ways of the parvenu so ridiculous. Monsieur and Madame Lhéry, paternal and tyrannical at the same time, gave excellent wine to their farmhands on Sunday; during the week they reproved them for putting a dash of vinegar in their water. They readily supplied their daughter with a fine piano, a lemonwood toilet set and richly-bound books; they scolded her for throwing an extra stick on the fire. At home they were poor and niggardly, in order to make their servants industrious and economical ; abroad they were puffed up with pride, and would have considered the slightest doubt of their opulence an insult. Kind-hearted, charitable, easily moved to pity as they were, they had succeeded, by their folly, in making themselves detested by their neighbors, who were even more vain and foolish than they.
    These were failings which Bénédict could not endure. Youth is much more bitter and intolerant to old age