Sainte-Croix kept his promise and offered no resistance; for some moments he followed the officer, surrounded by a crowd which seemed to have transferred all its curiosity to his account; then, at the corner of the Quai de d’Horloge, a man called up a carriage that had not been observed before, and Sainte-Croix took his place with the same haughty and disdainful air that he had shown throughout the scene we have just described.  The officer sat beside him, two of his men got up behind, and the other two, obeying no doubt their master’s orders, retired with a parting direction to the driver,

“The Bastille!”

Our readers will now permit us to make them more fully acquainted with the man who is to take the first place in the story.  The origin of Gaudin de Sainte-Croix was not known:  according to one tale, he was the natural son of a great lord; another account declared that he was the offspring of poor people, but that, disgusted with his obscure birth, he preferred a splendid disgrace, and therefore chose to pass for what he was not.  The only certainty is that he was born at Montauban, and in actual rank and position he was captain of the Tracy regiment.  At the time when this narrative opens, towards the end of 1665, Sainte-Croix was about twenty-eight or thirty, a fine young man of cheerful and lively appearance, a merry comrade at a banquet, and an excellent captain:  he took his pleasure with other men, and was so impressionable a character that he enjoyed a virtuous project as well as any plan for a debauch; in love he was most susceptible, and jealous to the point of madness even about a courtesan, had she once taken his fancy; his prodigality was princely, although he had no income; further, he was most sensitive to slights, as all men are who, because they are placed in an equivocal position, fancy that everyone who makes any reference to their origin is offering an intentional insult.

We must now see by what a chain of circumstances he had arrived at his present position.  About the year 1660, Sainte-Croix, while in the army, had made the acquaintance of the Marquis de Brinvilliers, maitre-de-camp of the Normandy regiment.

Their age was much the same, and so was their manner of life:  their virtues and their vices were similar, and thus it happened that a mere acquaintance grew into a friendship, and on his return from the field the marquis introduced Sainte-Croix to his wife, and he became an intimate of the house.  The usual results followed.  Madame de Brinvilliers was then scarcely eight-and-twenty:  she had married the marquis in 1651-that is, nine years before.  He enjoyed an income of 30,000 livres, to which she added her dowry of 200,000 livres, exclusive of her expectations in the future.  Her name was Marie-Madeleine; she had a sister and two brothers:  her father, M. de Dreux d’Aubray; was civil lieutenant at the Chatelet de Paris.  At the age of twenty-eight the marquise was at the height of her beauty:  her figure was small but perfectly proportioned; her rounded face was charmingly pretty; her features, so regular that no emotion seemed to alter their beauty, suggested the lines of a statue miraculously endowed with life:  it was easy enough to mistake for the repose of a happy conscience the cold, cruel calm which served as a mask to cover remorse.