When General Montcornet took possession of Les Aigues, Gaubertin was no longer rich enough to give up his place.  In order to marry his daughter to a rich banker he was obliged to give her a dowry of two hundred thousand francs; he had to pay thirty thousand for his son’s practice; and all that remained of his accumulations was three hundred and seventy thousand, out of which he would be forced, sooner or later, to pay the dowry of his remaining daughter, Elise, for whom he hoped to arrange a marriage at least as good as that of her sister.  The steward determined to study the general, in order to find out if he could disgust him with the place,—­hoping still to be able to carry out his defeated plan in his own interests.

With the peculiar instinct which characterizes those who make their fortunes by craft, Gaubertin believed in a resemblance of nature (which was not improbable) between an old soldier and an Opera-singer.  An actress, and a general of the Empire,—­surely they would have the same extravagant habits, the same careless prodigality?  To the one as to the other, riches came capriciously and by lucky chances.  If some soldiers are wily and astute and clever politicians, they are exceptions; a soldier is, usually, especially an accomplished cavalry officer like Montcornet, guileless, confident, a novice in business, and little fitted to understand details in the management of an estate.  Gaubertin flattered himself that he could catch and hold the general with the same net in which Mademoiselle Laguerre had finished her days.  But it so happened that the Emperor had once, intentionally, allowed Montcornet to play the same game in Pomerania that Gaubertin was playing at Les Aigues; consequently, the general fully understood a system of plundering.

In planting cabbages, to use the expression of the first Duc de Biron, the old cuirassier sought to divert his mind, by occupation, from dwelling on his fall.  Though he had yielded his “corps d’armee” to the Bourbons, that duty (performed by other generals and termed the disbanding of the army of the Loire) could not atone for the crime of having followed the man of the Hundred-Days to his last battle-field.  In presence of the allied army it was impossible for the peer of 1815 to remain in the service, still less at the Luxembourg.  Accordingly, Montcornet betook himself to the country by advice of a dismissed marshal, to plunder Nature herself.  The general was not deficient in the special cunning of an old military fox; and after he had spent a few days in examining his new property, he saw that Gaubertin was a steward of the old system,—­a swindler, such as the dukes and marshals of the Empire, those mushrooms bred from the common earth, were well acquainted with.