There was a great garden full of medicinal plants, and decoctions and distilleries were the chief variety enjoyed by the gentlewomen.  The Duchess had studied much in quaint Latin and French medical books, and, having great experience and good sense, was probably as good a doctor as any one in the kingdom except Ambroise Pare and his pupils; and she required her ladies to practise under her upon the numerous ailments that the peasants were continually bringing for her treatment.  ‘No one could tell,’ she said, ’how soon they might be dealing with gun-shot wounds, and all ought to know how to sew up a gash, or cure an argue.’

This department suited Eustacie much better than the stitching, and best of all she liked to be sent with Maitre Isaac to some cottage where solace for soul and body were needed, and the inmate was too ill to be brought to Madame la Duchess.  She was learning much and improving too in the orderly household, but her wanderings had made her something of a little gipsy.  She now and then was intolerably weary, and felt as if she had been entirely spoilt for her natural post.  ‘What would become of her,’ she said to Maitre Isaac, ’if she were too grand to dress Rayonette?’

She was not greatly distressed that the Montauban pursuivant turned out to have only the records of the Provencal nobility, and was forced to communicate with his brethren at Bordeaux before he could bring down the Ribaumont genealogy to the actual generation; and so slow was communication, so tardy the mode of doing everything, that the chestnut leaves were falling and autumn becoming winter before the blazoned letter showed Ribaumont, de Picardie—­’Gules, fretty or, a canton of the last, a leopard, sable.  Eustacie Berangere, m.  Annora, daughter and heiress of Villiam, Baron of Valvem, in the county of Dorisette, England, who beareth, azure, a siren regardant in a mirror proper.’  The siren was drawn in all her propriety impaled with the leopard, and she was so much more comprehensible than the names, to both Madame de Quinet and Eustacie, that it was a pity they could not direct their letters to her rather than to ‘Le Baron de Valvem,’ whose cruel W’s perplexed them so much.  However, the address was the least of Eustacie’s troubles; she should be only too glad when she got to that, and she was sitting in Maitre Isaac’s room, trying to make him dictate her sentences and asking him how to spell every third word, when the dinner-bell rang, and the whole household dropped down from salon, library, study, or chamber to the huge hall, with its pavement of black and white marble, and its long tables, for Madame de Quinet was no woman to discard wholesome old practices.

Then, as Eustacie, with Rayonette trotting at her side, and Maitre Isaac leaning on her arm, slowly made her way to that high table where dined Madame la Duchess, her grandsons, the ministers, the gentlemen in waiting, and some three or four women besides herself, she saw that the lower end of the great hall was full of silks, cloths, and ribbons heaped together; and, passing by the lengthy rank of retainers, she received a bow and look of recognition from a dark, acute-looking visage which she remembered to belong to the pedlar she had met at Charente.