I have no honour for a similar career, and no homage for a similar memory; but it is from those mingled characters that history derives her deepest lesson, her warnings for the weak, her cautions for the ambitious, and her wisdom for the wise.

On the retiring of the party for the night, my first act was to summon the old Swiss and his wife who had been left in charge of the mansion, and collect from them all their feeble memories could tell Clotilde.  But Madame la Marechale was a much more important personage in their old eyes, than the “charmante enfant” whom they had dandled on their knees, and who was likely to remain a “charmante enfant” to them during their lives.  The chateau had been the retreat of the Marechale after the death of her husband; and it was in its stately solitudes, and in the woods and wilds which surrounded it for many a league, that Clotilde had acquired those accomplished tastes, and that characteristic dignity and force of mind, which distinguished her from the frivolity of her country-women, however elegant and attractive, who had been trained in the salons of the court.  The green glades and fresh air of the forest had given beauty to her cheek and grace to her form; and scarcely conceiving how the rouged and jewelled Marechale could have endured such an absence from the circles of the young queen, and the “beaux restes” of the wits and beauties of the court of Louis the 15th, I thanked in soul the fortunate necessity which had driven her from the atmosphere of the Du Barris to the shades thus sacred to innocence and knowledge.

But the grand business of the thing was still to be done.  The picture was taken down at last, to the great sorrow of the old servants, who seemed to regard it as a patron saint, and who declared that its presence, and its presence alone, could have saved the mansion, in the first instance, from being burned by the “patriots,” who generally began their reforms of the nobility by laying their chateaux in ashes, and in the next, from being plundered by the multitudes of whiskered savages speaking unknown tongues, and came to leave France without “ni pain ni vin” for her legitimate sons.  But the will of Madame la Marechale was to them as the laws of the Medes and Persians, irresistible and unchangeable; and with heavy hearts they dismounted the portrait, and assisted in enfolding and encasing it, with much the same feeling that might have been shown in paying the last honours to a rightful branch of the beloved line.

But, in the wall which the picture had covered, I found a small recess, closed by an iron door, and evidently unknown to the Swiss and his old wife.  I might have hesitated about extending my enquiry further, but Time, the great discoverer of all things, saved my conscience:  with a slight pressure against the lock it gave way; the door flew open, and dropped off the hinges, a mass of rust and decay.  Within was a casket of a larger size than that generally used