It was useless for Norbert to turn away his head; he saw the Duke place the glass to his lips.  He was about to drink, but the young man could endure it no longer, and with a bound he sprang forward, snatched the glass from his father’s hand, and hurled it from the window, shouting in a voice utterly unlike his own,—­

“Do not drink.”

The Duke read the whole hideous truth in the face and manner of his son.  His features quivered, his face grew purple, and his eyes filled with blood.  He strove to speak, but only an inarticulate rattle could be heard; he then clasped his hands convulsively, swayed backwards and forwards, and then fell helplessly backwards, striking his head against an oaken sideboard that stood near.  Norbert tore open the door.

“Quick, help!” cried he.  “I have killed my father.”

CHAPTER IX.

The honor of the name.

The account that the Duke of Champdoce had given of M. de Puymandour’s mad longing for rank and title was true, and afforded a melancholy instance of that peculiar kind of foolish vanity.  He was a much happier man in his younger days, when he was known simply as Palouzet, which was his father’s name, whose only wish for distinction was to be looked upon as an honest man.  In those days he was much looked up to and respected, as a man who had possessed brains enough to amass a very large fortune by strictly honest means.  All this vanished, however, when the unhappy idea occurred to him to affix the title of Count to the name of an estate that he had recently purchased.

From that moment, all his tribulations in life may have been said to have commenced.  The nobility laughed at his assumption of hereditary rank, while the middle classes frowned at his pretensions to be superior to them, so that he passed the existence of a shuttlecock, continually suspended in the air, and struck at and dismissed from either side.

It may, therefore, be easily imagined how excessively anxious he was to bring about the marriage between his daughter Marie and the son of that mighty nobleman, the Duke of Champdoce.  He had offered to sacrifice one-third of his fortune for the honor of forming this connection, and would have given up the whole of it, could he but have seen a child in whose veins ran the united blood of Palouzet and the Champdoce seated upon his knee.  A marriage of this kind would have given him a real position; for to have a Champdoce for a son-in-law would compel all scoffers to bridle their tongues.