At this moment the sunbeams, falling in long lines athwart the group, lighted up the three heads at which the dog from time to time glanced up.  The spot on which this scene took place was magnificently fine.  The rond-point is at the entrance of the park of Gondreville, one of the finest estates in France, and by far the finest in the departments of the Aube; it boasts of long avenues of elms, a castle built from designs by Mansart, a park of fifteen hundred acres enclosed by a stone wall, nine large farms, a forest, mills, and meadows.  This almost regal property belonged before the Revolution to the family of Simeuse.  Ximeuse was a feudal estate in Lorraine; the name was pronounced Simeuse, and in course of time it came to be written as pronounced.

The great fortune of the Simeuse family, adherents of the House of Burgundy, dates from the time when the Guises were in conflict with the Valois.  Richelieu first, and afterwards Louis XIV. remembered their devotion to the factious house of Lorraine, and rebuffed them.  Then the Marquis de Simeuse, an old Burgundian, old Guiser, old leaguer, old frondeur (he inherited the four great rancors of the nobility against royalty), came to live at Cinq-Cygne.  The former courtier, rejected at the Louvre, married the widow of the Comte de Cinq-Cygne, younger branch of the famous family of Chargeboeuf, one of the most illustrious names in Champagne, and now as celebrated and opulent as the elder.  The marquis, among the richest men of his day, instead of wasting his substance at court, built the chateau of Gondreville, enlarged the estate by the purchase of others, and united the several domains, solely for the purposes of a hunting-ground.  He also built the Simeuse mansion at Troyes, not far from that of the Cinq-Cygnes.  These two old houses and the bishop’s palace were long the only stone mansions at Troyes.  The marquis sold Simeuse to the Duc de Lorraine.  His son wasted the father’s savings and some part of his great fortune under the reign of Louis XV., but he subsequently entered the navy, became a vice-admiral, and redeemed the follies of his youth by brilliant services.  The Marquis de Simeuse, son of this naval worthy, perished with his wife on the scaffold at Troyes, leaving twin sons, who emigrated and were, at the time our history opens, still in foreign parts following the fortunes of the house of Conde.

The rond-point was the scene of the meet in the time of the “Grand Marquis”—­a name given in the family to the Simeuse who built Gondreville.  Since 1789 Michu lived in the hunting lodge at the entrance to the park, built in the reign of Louis XIV., and called the pavilion of Cinq-Cygne.  The village of Cinq-Cygne is at the end of the forest of Nodesme (a corruption of Notre-Dame) which was reached through the fine avenue of four rows of elms where Michu’s dog was now suspecting spies.  After the death of the Grand Marquis this pavilion fell into disuse.  The vice-admiral preferred the court and the sea to Champagne, and his son gave the dilapidated building to Michu for a dwelling.