“The house will always be there and I can search it later,” thought the young man, following the carriage at a run, to solve his last doubts; and soon he did so.

The carriage stopped in the rue de Richelieu before a shop for artificial flowers, close to the rue de Menars.  The lady got out, entered the shop, sent out the money to pay the coachman, and presently left the shop herself, on foot, after buying a bunch of marabouts.  Marabouts for her black hair!  The officer beheld her, through the window-panes, placing the feathers to her head to see the effect, and he fancied he could hear the conversation between herself and the shop-woman.

“Oh! madame, nothing is more suitable for brunettes:  brunettes have something a little too strongly marked in their lines, and marabouts give them just that flow which they lack.  Madame la Duchesse de Langeais says they give a woman something vague, Ossianic, and very high-bred.”

“Very good; send them to me at once.”

Then the lady turned quickly toward the rue de Menars, and entered her own house.  When the door closed on her, the young lover, having lost his hopes, and worse, far worse, his dearest beliefs, walked through the streets like a drunken man, and presently found himself in his own room without knowing how he came there.  He flung himself into an arm-chair, put his head in his hands and his feet on the andirons, drying his boots until he burned them.  It was an awful moment,—­one of those moments in human life when the character is moulded, and the future conduct of the best of men depends on the good or evil fortune of his first action.  Providence or fatality?—­choose which you will.

This young man belonged to a good family, whose nobility was not very ancient; but there are so few really old families in these days, that all men of rank are ancient without dispute.  His grandfather had bought the office of counsellor to the Parliament of Paris, where he afterwards became president.  His sons, each provided with a handsome fortune, entered the army, and through their marriages became attached to the court.  The Revolution swept the family away; but one old dowager, too obstinate to emigrate, was left; she was put in prison, threatened with death, but was saved by the 9th Thermidor and recovered her property.  When the proper time came, about the year 1804, she recalled her grandson to France.  Auguste de Maulincour, the only scion of the Carbonnon de Maulincour, was brought up by the good dowager with the triple care of a mother, a woman of rank, and an obstinate dowager.  When the Restoration came, the young man, then eighteen years of age, entered the Maison-Rouge, followed the princes to Ghent, was made an officer in the body-guard, left it to serve in the line, but was recalled later to the Royal Guard, where, at twenty-three years of age, he found himself major of a cavalry regiment, —­a splendid position, due to his grandmother, who had played her cards well to obtain it, in spite of his youth.  This double biography is a compendium of the general and special history, barring variations, of all the noble families who emigrated having debts and property, dowagers and tact.