The grand equerry, a fair young man with blue eyes and a pallid face, was not without a certain dignity of thought; but his thin, undersized figure, and the follies of his aunt who had taken him to the Vilquins and elsewhere to pay his court, rendered him extremely diffident.  The house of Herouville had already been threatened with extinction by the deed of a deformed being (see the “Enfant Maudit” in “Philosophical Studies").  The grand marshal, that being the family term for the member who was made duke by Louis XIII., married at the age of eighty.  The young duke admired women, but he placed them too high and respected them too much; in fact, he adored them, and was only at his ease with those whom he could not respect.  This characteristic caused him to lead a double life.  He found compensation with women of easy virtue for the worship to which he surrendered himself in the salons, or, if you like, the boudoirs, of the faubourg Saint-Germain.  Such habits and his puny figure, his suffering face with its blue eyes turning upward in ecstasy, increased the ridicule already bestowed upon him,—­very unjustly bestowed, as it happened, for he was full of wit and delicacy; but his wit, which never sparkled, only showed itself when he felt at ease.  Fanny Beaupre, an actress who was supposed to be his nearest friend (at a price), called him “a sound wine so carefully corked that you break all your corkscrews.”  The beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, whom the grand equerry could only worship, annihilated him with a speech which, unfortunately, was repeated from mouth to mouth, like all such pretty and malicious sayings.

“He always seems to me,” she said, “like one of those jewels of fine workmanship which we exhibit but never wear, and keep in cotton-wool.”

Everything about him, even to his absurdly contrasting title of grand equerry, amused the good-natured king, Charles X., and made him laugh, —­although the Duc d’Herouville justified his appointment in the matter of being a fine horseman.  Men are like books, often understood and appreciated too late.  Modeste had seen the duke during his fruitless visit to the Vilquins, and many of these reflections passed through her mind as she watched him come and go.  But under the circumstances in which she now found herself, she saw plainly that the courtship of the Duc d’Herouville would save her from being at the mercy of either Canalis.

“I see no reason,” she said to Latournelle, “why the Duc d’Herouville should not be received.  I have passed, in spite of our indigence,” she continued, with a mischievous look at her father, “to the condition of heiress.  Haven’t you observed Gobenheim’s glances?  They have quite changed their character within a week.  He is in despair at not being able to make his games of whist count for mute adoration of my charms.”

“Hush, my darling!” cried Madame Latournelle, “here he comes.”

“Old Althor is in despair,” said Gobenheim to Monsieur Mignon as he entered.