“But he was the Comte de La Bastie before the Revolution,” answered another.

“So they call him a liberal just because he was plain Charles Mignon for twenty-five years!  What are we coming to?” said a third.

Modeste was considered, therefore, notwithstanding the silence of her parents and friends, as the richest heiress in Normandy, and all eyes began once more to see her merits.  The aunt and sister of the Duc d’Herouville confirmed in the aristocratic salons of Bayeux Monsieur Charles Mignon’s right to the title and arms of count, derived from Cardinal Mignon, for whom the Cardinal’s hat and tassels were added as a crest.  They had seen Mademoiselle de La Bastie when they were staying at the Vilquins, and their solicitude for the impoverished head of their house now became active.

“If Mademoiselle de La Bastie is really as rich as she is beautiful,” said the aunt of the young duke, “she is the best match in the province. She at least is noble.”

The last words were aimed at the Vilquins, with whom they had not been able to come to terms, after incurring the humiliation of staying in that bourgeois household.

Such were the little events which, contrary to the rules of Aristotle and of Horace, precede the introduction of another person into our story; but the portrait and the biography of this personage, this late arrival, shall not be long, taking into consideration his own diminutiveness.  The grand equerry shall not take more space here than he will take in history.  Monsieur le Duc d’Herouville, offspring of the matrimonial autumn of the last governor of Normandy, was born during the emigration in 1799, at Vienna.  The old marechal, father of the present duke, returned with the king in 1814, and died in 1819, before he was able to marry his son.  He could only leave him the vast chateau of Herouville, the park, a few dependencies, and a farm which he had bought back with some difficulty; all of which returned a rental of about fifteen thousand francs a year.  Louis XVIII. gave the post of grand equerry to the son, who, under Charles X., received the usual pension of twelve thousand francs which was granted to the pauper peers of France.  But what were these twenty-seven thousand francs a year and the salary of grand equerry to such a family?  In Paris, of course, the young duke used the king’s coaches, and had a mansion provided for him in the rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, near the royal stables; his salary paid for his winters in the city, and his twenty-seven thousand francs for the summers in Normandy.  If this noble personage was still a bachelor he was less to blame than his aunt, who was not versed in La Fontaine’s fables.  Mademoiselle d’Herouville made enormous pretensions wholly out of keeping with the spirit of the times; for great names, without the money to keep them up, can seldom win rich heiresses among the higher French nobility, who are themselves embarrassed to provide