old women.  No one talked of anything but of Savaron’s two projects.  And thus, after eighteen months of underground labor, the ambitious lawyer had succeeded in stirring to its depths the most stagnant town in France, the most unyielding to foreign influence, in finding the length of its foot, to use a vulgar phrase, and exerting a preponderant influence without stirring from his own room.  He had solved the singular problem of how to be powerful without being popular.

In the course of this winter he won seven lawsuits for various priests of Besancon.  At moments he could breathe freely at the thought of his coming triumph.  This intense desire, which made him work so many interests and devise so many springs, absorbed the last strength of his terribly overstrung soul.  His disinterestedness was lauded, and he took his clients’ fees without comment.  But this disinterestedness was, in truth, moral usury; he counted on a reward far greater to him than all the gold in the world.

In the month of October 1834 he had brought, ostensibly to serve a merchant who was in difficulties, with money lent him by Leopold Hannequin, a house which gave him a qualification for election.  He had not seemed to seek or desire this advantageous bargain.

“You are really a remarkable man,” said the Abbe de Grancey, who, of course, had watched and understood the lawyer.  The Vicar-General had come to introduce to him a Canon who needed his professional advice.  “You are a priest who has taken the wrong turning.”  This observation struck Savarus.

Rosalie, on her part, had made up her mind, in her strong girl’s head, to get Monsieur de Savarus into the drawing-room and acquainted with the society of the Hotel de Rupt.  So far she had limited her desires to seeing and hearing Albert.  She had compounded, so to speak, and a composition is often no more than a truce.

Les Rouxey, the inherited estate of the Wattevilles, was worth just ten thousand francs a year; but in other hands it would have yielded a great deal more.  The Baron in his indifference—­for his wife was to have, and in fact had, forty thousand francs a year—­left the management of les Rouxey to a sort of factotum, an old servant of the Wattevilles named Modinier.  Nevertheless, whenever the Baron and his wife wished to go out of the town, they went to les Rouxey, which is very picturesquely situated.  The chateau and the park were, in fact, created by the famous Watteville, who in his active old age was passionately attached to this magnificent spot.

Between two precipitous hills—­little peaks with bare summits known as the great and the little Rouxey—­in the heart of a ravine where the torrents from the heights, with the Dent de Vilard at their head, come tumbling to join the lovely upper waters of the Doubs, Watteville had a huge dam constructed, leaving two cuttings for the overflow.  Above this dam he made a beautiful lake, and below it two cascades; and these, uniting a few yards below the falls, formed a lovely little river to irrigate the barren, uncultivated valley, and these two hills he enclosed in a ring fence, and built himself a retreat on the dam, which he widened to two acres by accumulating above it all the soil which had to be removed to make a channel for the river and the irrigation canals.