Monsieur de Lucan was born in Vastville.  The poetic reminiscences of childhood mingled in his imagination with the natural poetry of that site, and made it dear to him.  Under pretext of hunting, he came on a pilgrimage to it every year.  Since his marriage only, he had given up that habit of the heart, in order not to leave Clotilde, who was detained in Paris by her daughter; but it had been agreed upon that they would go and bury themselves in that retreat for a season as soon as they had recovered their liberty.  Clotilde only knew Vastville from her husband’s enthusiastic descriptions; she loved it on his representations, and it was for her, in advance, an enchanted spot.  Nevertheless, when the carriage that brought her from the station entered, at nightfall, among the wooded hills, in the gloomy avenue that led up to the chateau, she felt an impression as of cold.

“Mon Dieu! my dear,” she said, laughingly, “your chateau is a perfect castle of Udolpho!”

Lucan excused his chateau as best he could, and protested, moreover, that he was ready to leave it the very next day, if she were not better pleased with its appearance after sunrise.

It was not long before she became passionately fond of it.  Her happiness, hitherto so constrained, blossomed freely for the first time in that solitude, and shed upon it a charming light.  She even expressed the wish of spending the winter and waiting there for Julia, who was to return to France in the course of the following year.  Lucan offered some slight opposition to that project, which appeared to him rather over-heroic for a Parisian, but ended by adopting it, too happy himself to harbor the romance of his love in that romantic spot.  He began, however, taxing his ingenuity to attenuate what there might be too austere in that abode, by opening relations with some of the neighbors for Clotilde’s benefit, and by procuring her, at intervals, her mother’s society.  Madame de Pers was kind enough to lend herself to that combination, although the country was generally repulsive to her, and Vastville in particular had in her eyes a sinister character.  She pretended that she heard at night noises in the walls and moans in the woods.  She slept with one eye open and two candles burning.  The magnificent cliffs that bordered the coast a short distance off, and which they tried to make her admire, caused her a painful sensation.

“Very fine!” she said, “very wild! quite wild!  But it makes me sick; I feel as though I were on top of the towers of Notre Dame!  Besides, my children, love beautifies everything, and I understand your transports perfectly.  As to myself, you must excuse me if I do not share them.  I can never go into ecstasies over such a country as this.  I am as fond of the country as any one, but this is not the country—­it is the desert, Arabia Petroea, I know not what.  And as to your chateau, my dear friend—­I am sorry to tell you so:  it has a savor of crime.  Look well, and you’ll see that a murder has been committed in it.”