Madame Dumay, a little American about thirty-six years of age, wiped her eyes furtively; she adored Modeste, and feared a catastrophe.

“You are not very lively this evening,” remarked Modeste.

“We are playing,” said Gobenheim, sorting his cards.

No matter how interesting this situation may appear, it can be made still more so by explaining Dumay’s position towards Modeste.  If the brevity of this explanation makes it seem rather dry, the reader must pardon its dryness in view of our desire to get through with these preliminaries as speedily as possible, and the necessity of relating the main circumstances which govern all dramas.

CHAPTER III

Preliminaries

Jean Francois Bernard Dumay, born at Vannes, started as a soldier for the army of Italy in 1799.  His father, president of the revolutionary tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office that the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth Thermidor.  On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this catastrophe occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to Italy at the age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies were beginning to yield.  On the way he met a young man in the department of Var, who for reasons analogous to his own was in search of glory, believing a battle-field less perilous than his own Provence.  Charles Mignon, the last scion of an ancient family, which gave its name to a street in Paris and to a mansion built by Cardinal Mignon, had a shrewd and calculating father, whose one idea was to save his feudal estate of La Bastie in the Comtat from the claws of the Revolution.  Like all timid folk of that day, the Comte de La Bastie, now citizen Mignon, found it more wholesome to cut off other people’s heads than to let his own be cut off.  The sham terrorist disappeared after the 9th Thermidor, and was then inscribed on the list of emigres.  The estate of La Bastie was sold; the towers and bastions of the old castle were pulled down, and citizen Mignon was soon after discovered at Orleans and put to death with his wife and all his children except Charles, whom he had sent to find a refuge for the family in the Upper Alps.

Horrorstruck at the news, Charles waited for better times in a valley of Mont Genevra; and there he remained till 1799, subsisting on a few louis which his father had put into his hand at starting.  Finally, when twenty-three years of age, and without other fortune than his fine presence and that southern beauty which, when it reaches perfection, may be called sublime (of which Antinous, the favorite of Adrian, is the type), Charles resolved to wager his Provencal audacity —­taking it, like many another youth, for a vocation—­on the red cloth of war.  On his way to the base of the army at Nice he met the Breton.  The pair became intimate, partly from the contrasts in their characters; they drank from the same cup at the wayside torrents, broke the same biscuit, and were both made sergeants at the peace which followed the battle of Marengo.