“To have children, to have a wife, to adore them—­what is it but to have many hearts and bare them to a dagger?” he cried, springing up with the bound of a tiger and walking up and down the room.  “To be a father is to give one’s self over, bound hand and foot to sorrow.  If I meet that D’Estourny I will kill him.  To have daughters!—­one gives her life to a scoundrel, the other, my Modeste, falls a victim to whom? a coward, who deceives her with the gilded paper of a poet.  If it were Canalis himself it might not be so bad; but that Scapin of a lover!—­I will strangle him with my two hands,” he cried, making an involuntary gesture of furious determination.  “And what then? suppose my Modeste were to die of grief?”

He gazed mechanically out of the windows of the hotel des Princes, and then returned to the sofa, where he sat motionless.  The fatigues of six voyages to India, the anxieties of speculation, the dangers he had encountered and evaded, and his many griefs, had silvered Charles Mignon’s head.  His handsome soldierly face, so pure in outline and now bronzed by the suns of China and the southern seas, had acquired an air of dignity which his present grief rendered almost sublime.

“Mongenod told me he felt confidence in the young man who is coming to ask me for my daughter,” he thought at last; and at this moment Ernest de La Briere was announced by one of the servants whom Monsieur de La Bastie had attached to himself during the last four years.

“You have come, monsieur, from my friend Mongenod?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Ernest, growing timid when he saw before him a face as sombre as Othello’s.  “My name is Ernest de La Briere, related to the family of the late cabinet minister, and his private secretary during his term of office.  On his dismissal, his Excellency put me in the Court of Claims, to which I am legal counsel, and where I may possibly succeed as chief—­”

“And how does all this concern Mademoiselle de La Bastie?” asked the count.

“Monsieur, I love her; and I have the unhoped-for happiness of being loved by her.  Hear me, monsieur,” cried Ernest, checking a violent movement on the part of the angry father.  “I have the strangest confession to make to you, a shameful one for a man of honor; but the worst punishment of my conduct, natural enough in itself, is not the telling of it to you; no, I fear the daughter even more than the father.”

Ernest then related simply, and with the nobleness that comes of sincerity, all the facts of his little drama, not omitting the twenty or more letters, which he had brought with him, nor the interview which he had just had with Canalis.  When Monsieur Mignon had finished reading the letters, the unfortunate lover, pale and suppliant, actually trembled under the fiery glance of the Provencal.

“Monsieur,” said the latter, “in this whole matter there is but one error, but that is cardinal.  My daughter will not have six millions; at the utmost, she will have a marriage portion of two hundred thousand francs, and very doubtful expectations.”