disturbed its even tenor by her sudden journeys, her uncertain returns, and by what Madame d’Hauteserre called her pranks.  But with all this peacefulness there existed at Cinq-Cygne conflicting interests and certain causes of dissension.  In the first place Durieu and his wife were jealous of Catherine and Gothard, who lived in greater intimacy with their young mistress, the idol of the household, than they did.  Then the two d’Hauteserres, encouraged by Mademoiselle Goujet and the abbe, wanted their sons as well as the Simeuse brothers to take the oath and return to this quiet life, instead of living miserably in foreign countries.  Laurence scouted the odious compromise and stood firmly for the monarchy, militant and implacable.  The four old people, anxious that their present peaceful existence should not be risked, nor their spot of refuge, saved from the furious waters of the revolutionary torrent, lost, did their best to convert Laurence to their cautious views, believing that her influence counted for much in the unwillingness of their sons and the Simeuse twins to return to France.  The superb disdain with which she met the project frightened these poor people, who were not mistaken in their fears that she was meditating what they called knight-errantry.  This jarring of opinion came to the surface after the explosion of the infernal machine in the rue Saint-Nicaise, the first royalist attempt against the conqueror of Marengo after his refusal to treat with the house of Bourbon.  The d’Hauteserres considered it fortunate that Bonaparte escaped that danger, believing that the republicans had instigated it.  But Laurence wept with rage when she heard he was safe.  Her despair overcame her usual reticence, and she vehemently complained that God had deserted the sons of Saint-Louis.

“I,” she exclaimed, “I could have succeeded!  Have we no right,” she added, seeing the stupefaction her words produced on the faces about her, and addressing the abbe, “no right to attack the usurper by every means in our power?”

“My child,” replied the abbe, “the Church has been greatly blamed by philosophers for declaring in former times that the same weapons might be employed against usurpers which the usurpers themselves had employed to succeed; but in these days the Church owes far too much to the First Consul not to protect him against that maxim,—­which, by the by, was due to the Jesuits.”

“So the Church abandons us!” she answered, gloomily.

From that day forth whenever the four old people talked of submitting to the decrees of Providence, Laurence left the room.  Of late, the abbe, shrewder than Monsieur d’Hauteserre, instead of discussing principles, drew pictures of the material advantages of the consular rule, less to convert the countess than to detect in her eyes some expression which might enlighten him as to her projects.  Gothard’s frequent disappearances, the long rides of his mistress, and her evident preoccupation, which, for the last