Les confidences - 1857 Author:Alphonse de Lamartine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: return, my grandfather and grandmother died in peace and ripeness of age in their beds. They had passed through the great tempest, and had been shaken by it, but... more » not prostrated. They had lost none of their children in it, and they could hope, when they closed their eyes, that the storm-cloud was exhausted for a long time to come, and that life would be more serene for those to whom they left it, when they departed from this earth. BOOK III. NOTE I. The whole of my grandfather's fortune, according to the intentions as well as the customs of the times, was to have gone to the eldest son. But as the new laws had annulled the right of entail, and suppressed that of primogeniture, and as the vows of poverty m.ulc by my aunts, my father's sisters, were null in the eyes of the law, the family had to proceed to a division of the property. This property was considerable, ill Franche Comte as well as in Burgundy. My father, by exacting his share like the rest of his brothers and sisters, might, by a single word, have changed kis lot, and obtained one of the finest landed estates that the family had to divide. His scrupulous respect for his father's intentions kept him from even thinking of violating those intentions after his death. The revolutionary enactments suppressing the laws of primogeniture were quite recent; in his eyes, although he thought them very just, they yet had the appearance of compression, and of violence done to paternal authority. Asking their application in his favor against his elder brother seemed to him an abuse of his situation. He resolved, without claiming any merit for so doing, to give up all pretensions to the estates of his father and mother, and to content himself with the very small portion which had been secured to him by his marriage contract. He...« less