“And so you think that we have found another to take its place?  That would have been worth while!  No!  I shall have to do as they do in the play, when the long-lost son or brother proves his identity by his moles and scars!  Look at that knot, and at this crack, which you must have noticed a hundred times.  Is it your tree or isn’t it?”

Eugenie could doubt no longer, and her surprise and delight knew no bounds.  To the Count’s family this tree always suggested the story of a most excellent woman, who lived more than a hundred years before their day, and who well deserves a word in passing.

The Count’s grandfather—­a statesman of such repute in Vienna that he had been honored with the confidence of two successive rulers—­was as happy in his private life as in his public life; for he possessed a most excellent wife, Renate Leonore.  During her repeated visits to France she came in contact with the brilliant court of Louis XIV., and with the most distinguished men and women of the day.  She sympathized with the ever-varying intellectual pleasures of the court without sacrificing in the least her strong, inborn sense of honor and propriety.  On this very account, perhaps, she was the leader of a certain naive opposition, and her correspondence gives many a hint of the courage and independence with which she could defend her sound principles and firm opinions, and could attack her adversary in his weakest spot, all without giving offense.

Her lively interest in all the personages whom one could meet at the house of a Ninon, in the centres of cultivation and learning, was nevertheless so modest and so well controlled that she was honored with the friendship of one of the noblest women of the time—­Mme. de Sevigne.  The Count, after his grandmother’s death, had found in an old oaken chest, full of interesting papers, the most charming letters from the Marquise and her daughter.

From the hand of Mme. de Sevigne, indeed, she had received, during a fete at Trianon, the sprig from an orange-tree, which she had planted and which became in Germany a flourishing tree.  For perhaps twenty-five years it grew under her care, and afterward was treated with the greatest solicitude by children and grandchildren.  Prized for its own actual worth, it was treasured the more as the living symbol of an age which, intellectually, was then regarded as little less than divine—­an age in which we, today, can find little that is truly admirable, but which was preparing the way for events, only a few years distant from our innocent story, which shook the world.