“My mother died when I was twenty, and my grandfather two years later. It was rather lonely after that; and in ‘85 I married a distant cousin in New Orleans. Things might have been different if she’d lived, but she died when my son Denis was born. Then I had only Denis. I didn’t try marriage again, but gave all my time to the boy. He was like me – like all the de Russys – darkish and tall and thin, and with the devil of a temper. I gave him the same training my grandfather had give me, but he didn’t need much training when it came to points of honor. It was in him, I reckon. Never saw such high spirit – all I could do to keep him from running away to the Spanish War when he was eleven! Romantic young devil, too – full of high notions – you’d call ‘em Victorian, now – no trouble at all to make him let the nigger wenches alone. I sent him to the same school I’d gone to, and to Princeton, too. He was Class of 1909.
“In the end he decided to be a doctor, and went a year to the Harvard Medical School. Then he hit on the idea of keeping to the old French tradition of the family, and argued me into sending him across to the Sorbonne. I did – and proudly enough, though I knew how lonely I’d be with him so far off. Would to God I hadn’t! I thought he was the safest kind of boy to be in Paris. He had a room in the Rue St. Jacques – that’s near the University in the ‘Latin Quarter’—but according to his letters and his friends he didn’t cut up with the gayer dogs at all. The people he knew were mostly young fellows from home – serious students and artists who thought more of their work than of striking attitudes and painting the town red.
“But of course there were lots of fellows who were on a sort of dividing line between serious studies and the devil. The aesthetes – the decadents, you know. Experiments in life and sensation – the Baudelaire kind of a chap. Naturally Denis ran up against a good many of these, and saw a good deal of their life. They had all sorts of crazy circles and cults – imitation devil-worship, fake Black Masses, and the like. Doubt if it did them much harm on the whole – probably most of ‘em forgot all about it in a year or two. One of the deepest in this queer stuff was a fellow Denis had known at school – for that matter, whose father I’d known myself. Frank Marsh, of New Orleans. Disciple of Lafcadio Hearn and Gauguin and Van Gogh – regular epitome of the yellow ‘nineties. Poor devil – he had the makings of a great artist, at that.