Evidently the General had not the slightest recollection of the postscript.  Camors tried to be contented, but would continually ask himself why he had come to Campvallon, in the midst of his family, of whom he was not overfond, and in the depths of the country, which he execrated.  Luckily, the castle boasted a library well stocked with works on civil and international law, jurisprudence, and political economy.  He took advantage of it; and, resuming the thread of those serious studies which had been broken off during his period of hopelessness, plunged into those recondite themes that pleased his active intelligence and his awakened ambition.  Thus he waited patiently until politeness would permit him to bring to an explanation the former friend and companion-in-arms of his father.  In the morning he rode on horseback; gave a lesson in fencing to his cousin Sigismund, the son of Madame de la Roche-Jugan; then shut himself up in the library until the evening, which he passed at bezique with the General.  Meantime he viewed with the eye of a philosopher the strife of the covetous relatives who hovered around their rich prey.

Madame de la Roche-Jugan had invented an original way of making herself agreeable to the General, which was to persuade him he had disease of the heart.  She continually felt his pulse with her plump hand, sometimes reassuring him, and at others inspiring him with a salutary terror, although he denied it.

“Good heavens! my dear cousin!” he would exclaim, “let me alone.  I know I am mortal like everybody else.  What of that?  But I see your aim-it is to convert me!  Ta-ta!”

She not only wished to convert him, but to marry him, and bury him besides.

She based her hopes in this respect chiefly on her son Sigismund; knowing that the General bitterly regretted having no one to inherit his name.  He had but to marry Madame de la Roche-Jugan and adopt her son to banish this care.  Without a single allusion to this fact, the Countess failed not to turn the thoughts of the General toward it with all the tact of an accomplished intrigante, with all the ardor of a mother, and with all the piety of an unctuous devotee.

Her sister, the Baroness Tonnelier, bitterly confessed her own disadvantage.  She was not a widow.  And she had no son.  But she had two daughters, both of them graceful, very elegant and sparkling.  One was Madame Bacquiere, the wife of a broker; the other, Madame Van-Cuyp, wife of a young Hollander, doing business at Paris.

Both interpreted life and marriage gayly; both floated from one year into another dancing, riding, hunting, coquetting, and singing recklessly the most risque songs of the minor theatres.  Formerly, Camors, in his pensive mood, had taken an aversion to these little examples of modern feminine frivolity.  Since he had changed his views of life he did them more justice.  He said, calmly: 

“They are pretty little animals that follow their instincts.”