watch them climbing, we admire their agility, but once at the summit we see only their absurd and contemptible parts.  The reverse side of my host’s character was made up of pettiness with the addition of envy.  The peerage and he were on diverging lines.  To have an ambition and gratify it shows merely the insolence of strength, but to live below one’s avowed ambition is a constant source of ridicule to petty minds.  Monsieur de Chessel did not advance with the straightforward step of a strong man.  Twice elected deputy, twice defeated; yesterday director-general, to-day nothing at all, not even prefect, his successes and his defeats had injured his nature, and given him the sourness of invalided ambition.  Though a brave man and a witty one and capable of great things, envy, which is the root of existence in Touraine, the inhabitants of which employ their native genius in jealousy of all things, injured him in upper social circles, where a dissatisfied man, frowning at the success of others, slow at compliments and ready at epigram, seldom succeeds.  Had he sought less he might perhaps have obtained more; but unhappily he had enough genuine superiority to make him wish to advance in his own way.

At this particular time Monsieur de Chessel’s ambition had a second dawn.  Royalty smiled upon him, and he was now affecting the grand manner.  Still he was, I must say, most kind to me, and he pleased me for the very simple reason that with him I had found peace and rest for the first time.  The interest, possibly very slight, which he showed in my affairs, seemed to me, lonely and rejected as I was, an image of paternal love.  His hospitable care contrasted so strongly with the neglect to which I was accustomed, that I felt a childlike gratitude to the home where no fetters bound me and where I was welcomed and even courted.

The owners of Frapesle are so associated with the dawn of my life’s happiness that I mingle them in all those memories I love to revive.  Later, and more especially in connection with his letters-patent, I had the pleasure of doing my host some service.  Monsieur de Chessel enjoyed his wealth with an ostentation that gave umbrage to certain of his neighbors.  He was able to vary and renew his fine horses and elegant equipages; his wife dressed exquisitely; he received on a grand scale; his servants were more numerous than his neighbors approved; for all of which he was said to be aping princes.  The Frapesle estate is immense.  Before such luxury as this the Comte de Mortsauf, with one family cariole,—­which in Touraine is something between a coach without springs and a post-chaise,—­forced by limited means to let or farm Clochegourde, was Tourangean up to the time when royal favor restored the family to a distinction possibly unlooked for.  His greeting to me, the younger son of a ruined family whose escutcheon dated back to the Crusades, was intended to show contempt for the large fortune and to belittle the possessions, the woods, the arable lands, the meadows, of a neighbor who was not of noble birth.  Monsieur de Chessel fully understood this.  They always met politely; but there was none of that daily intercourse or that agreeable intimacy which ought to have existed between Clochegourde and Frapesle, two estates separated only by the Indre, and whose mistresses could have beckoned to each other from their windows.