Here I am, then, in the situation that Lawyer Laubepin obtained for me.  I am alone at last, thank goodness, sitting in a gloomy room in this old Breton castle, in which the former steward to the Laroque family used to live.  My position is certainly very strange, but as Laubepin was discreet, and did not tell his clients that he was sending them a new steward in the person of the young Marquis of Champcey, perhaps I shall not find my post very difficult.  I was afraid that the Laroques were a family of the vulgarly rich sort, like the dreadful persons who have bought my father’s lands.  Laroque is a picturesque figure in his old age, and though his widowed daughter-in-law is rather more commonplace, his grand-daughter, Marguerite Laroque, is a nobly beautiful girl.

If it were not for my accursed pride, I should now feel happier than I have ever felt since that day of disaster, misery, and shame when Laubepin told me that my poor dead father had lost his fortune in speculations, and left nothing but his title and his debts.  Well, I have paid the debts, and if I can now only earn enough money to keep my little sister Helene at school, I shall not grumble at my lot.  I feel the loss of my friends, it is true.  There is not a soul I can confide in, and I must find some outlet for the thoughts and feelings that oppress me; so I will keep this diary.

It will be at least a silent confidant, and perhaps when I am older I shall be able to read with a certain pleasurable interest its record of my singular adventures.  No other man in France, on May 1, 1857, can have been transformed so suddenly, as by the wand of a witch, from a powerful and wealthy young nobleman of ancient lineage into a humble and despised domestic servant.  Perhaps a good fairy will appear and restore me to my proper shape; but I wish she had appeared at dinner this evening.  There were twenty guests, and it was the first time since the change of my fortunes that I took part in a society affair.  Nobody spoke to me, except the pretty little governess of the family, Mlle. Helouin; and we were placed at the end of the table.  The position of honour was given to a young and brilliant nobleman, M. de Bevallan, whose estate joined that of the Laroque family.  I gathered from Mlle. Helouin that it was his ambition to unite the two estates by marrying Mlle. Marguerite Laroque.  I was, therefore, surprised when the lovely heiress led her grandfather into the room when everybody was seated, placed him in a chair by Bevallan, and came and sat by my side.

“She can’t,” I thought to myself, “be much in love with her wooer,” and I began to study her with a certain curiosity.  Her fine, clear-cut features and large dark eyes attracted me; and by way of opening the conversation I spoke of the wildly beautiful scenery through which I had passed on my way to the castle.  It was a bad beginning.

“I see,” she said, with a singular expression of irony, “that you are a poet.  You must talk about the forests and moorlands with Mlle. Helouin, who also adores these things.  For my part I do not love them.”