During his military career in the army of the Conde, he had received a sabre cut across his cheek, and the cicatrice imparted a strange and unpleasant expression to his face.  He was not a bad-hearted man, but headstrong, violent, and tyrannical to a degree.  The peasants saluted him with a mixture of respect and dread as he walked to the chapel, to which he was a regular attendant on Sundays, with his son.  During the Mass he made the responses in an audible voice, and at its conclusion invariably put a five-franc piece into the plate.  This, his subscription to the newspaper, and the sum he paid for being shaved twice each week, constituted the whole of his outlay upon himself.  He kept an excellent table, however; plump fowls, vegetables of all kinds, and the most delicious fruit were never absent from it.  Everything, however, that appeared upon his well-plenished board was the produce of his fields, gardens, or woods.  The nobility and gentry of the neighborhood frequently invited him to their hospitable tables, for they looked upon him as the head and chief of the nobility of the county; but he always refused their invitations, saying plainly, “No man who has the slightest respect for himself will accept hospitalities which he is not in a position to return.”  It was not the grinding clutch of poverty that drove the Duke to this exercise of severe economy, for his income from his estates brought him in fifty thousand francs per annum; and it was reported that his investments brought him in as much more.  As a matter of course, therefore, he was looked upon as a miser, and a victim to the sordid vice of avarice.

His past life might, in some degree, offer an explanation of this conduct.  Born in 1780, the Duke de Champdoce had joined the band of emigrants which swelled the ranks of Conde’s army.  An implacable opposer of the Revolution, he resided, during the glorious days of the Empire, in London, where dire poverty compelled him to gain a livelihood as a fencing master at the Restoration.  He came back with the Bourbons to his native land, and, by an almost miraculous chance, was put again in possession of his ancestral domains.  But in his opinion he was living in a state of utter destitution as compared to the enormous revenues enjoyed by the dead-and-gone members of the Champdoce family; and what pained him more was to see rise up by the side of the old aristocracy a new race which had attached itself to commerce and entered into business transactions.  As he gazed upon the new order of things, the man whose pride of birth and position almost amounted to insanity, conceived the project to which he determined to devote the remainder of his life.  He imagined that he had discovered a means by which he could restore the ancient house of Champdoce to all its former splendor and position.  “I can,” said he, “by living like a peasant and resorting to no unnecessary expense, treble my capital in twenty years; and if my son and my grandson will only follow my example,