The old Marquis did not long remain with us.  He caught a severe cold in the winter, and had no strength to rally.  Tryphena would have it that he sank from taking nothing but tisanes made of herbs; and that if she might only have given him a good hot sack posset, he would have recovered; but he shuddered at the thought, and when a doctor came from Saumur, he bled the poor old gentleman, faintings came on, and he died the next day.  I was glad Tryphena’s opinion was only expressed in English.

The poor old man had been very kind to me, and had made me love him better than I should have supposed to be possible when we crossed from Dover.  The very last thing he had done was to write to my mother, placing his hotel at Paris at her disposal in case she and her son should find it expedient to leave England; and when his will was opened it proved that he had left me personal guardian and manager of the estates of his heir, my little Gaspard, now M. de Nidemerle, joining no one with me in the charge but my half-brother the Baron de Solivet.

I had helped him, read letters to him, and written them for him, and overlooked his accounts enough for the work not to be altogether new and strange to me, and I took it up eagerly.  I had never forgotten the sermon by the holy Father Vincent, whom the Church has since acknowledged as a saint, and our excellent Abbe had heightened the impression that a good work lay prepared for me; but he warned me to be prudent, and I am afraid I was hot-headed and eager.

Much had grieved me in the six months I had spent in the country, in the state of the peasantry.  I believe that in the Bocage they are better off than in many parts of France, but even there they seemed to me much oppressed and weighed down.  Their huts were wretched—­ they had no chimneys, no glass in the windows, no garden, not even anything comfortable for the old to sit in; and when I wanted to give a poor rheumatic old man a warm cushion, I found it was carefully hidden away lest M. l’Intendant should suppose the family too well off.

Those seigniorial rights then seemed to me terrible.  The poor people stood in continual fear either of the intendant of the king or of the Marquis, or of the collector of the dues of the Church.  At harvest time, a bough was seen sticking in half the sheaves.  In every ten, one sheaf is marked for the tithe, tow for the seigneur, two for the king; and the officer of each takes the best, so that only the worst are left for the peasant.

Nay, the only wonder seemed to me that there were any to be had at all, for our intendant thought it his duty to call off the men from their own fields for the days due from them whenever he wanted anything to be done to our land (or his own, or his son’s-in-law), without the slightest regard to the damage their crops suffered from neglect.