The chevalier had repudiated the ridiculous costume still preserved by certain monarchical old men; he had frankly modernized himself.  He was always seen in a maroon-colored coat with gilt buttons, half-tight breeches of poult-de-soie with gold buckles, a white waistcoat without embroidery, and a tight cravat showing no shirt-collar,—­a last vestige of the old French costume which he did not renounce, perhaps, because it enabled him to show a neck like that of the sleekest abbe.  His shoes were noticeable for their square buckles, a style of which the present generation has no knowledge; these buckles were fastened to a square of polished black leather.  The chevalier allowed two watch-chains to hang parallel to each other from each of his waistcoat pockets,—­another vestige of the eighteenth century, which the Incroyables had not disdained to use under the Directory.  This transition costume, uniting as it did two centuries, was worn by the chevalier with the high-bred grace of an old French marquis, the secret of which is lost to France since the day when Fleury, Mole’s last pupil, vanished.

The private life of this old bachelor was apparently open to all eyes, though in fact it was quite mysterious.  He lived in a lodging that was modest, to say the best of it, in the rue du Cours, on the second floor of a house belonging to Madame Lardot, the best and busiest washerwoman in the town.  This circumstance will explain the excessive nicety of his linen.  Ill-luck would have it that the day came when Alencon was guilty of believing that the chevalier had not always comported himself as a gentleman should, and that in fact he was secretly married in his old age to a certain Cesarine,—­the mother of a child which had had the impertinence to come into the world without being called for.

“He had given his hand,” as a certain Monsieur du Bousquier remarked, “to the person who had long had him under irons.”

This horrible calumny embittered the last days of the dainty chevalier all the more because, as the present Scene will show, he had lost a hope long cherished to which he had made many sacrifices.

Madame Lardot leased to the chevalier two rooms on the second floor of her house, for the modest sum of one hundred francs a year.  The worthy gentleman dined out every day, returning only in time to go to bed.  His sole expense therefore was for breakfast, invariably composed of a cup of chocolate, with bread and butter and fruits in their season.  He made no fire except in the coldest winter, and then only enough to get up by.  Between eleven and four o’clock he walked about, went to read the papers, and paid visits.  From the time of his settling in Alencon he had nobly admitted his poverty, saying that his whole fortune consisted in an annuity of six hundred francs a year, the sole remains of his former opulence,—­a property which obliged him to see his man of business (who held the annuity papers) quarterly.  In truth, one of the Alencon bankers paid him every three months one hundred and fifty francs, sent down by Monsieur Bordin of Paris, the last of the procureurs du Chatelet.  Every one knew these details because the chevalier exacted the utmost secrecy from the persons to whom he first confided them.