iction of his laws. In consequence
he immediately ordered that if the Marquis de Ganges were found in
France he should be proceeded against with the utmost rigour.

Happily for the marquis, the Comte de Ganges, the only one of his
brothers who had remained in France, and indeed in favour, learned the
king's decision in time. He took post from Versailles, and making the
greatest haste, went to warn him of the danger that was threatening;
both together immediately left Ganges, and withdrew to Avignon. The
district of Venaissin, still belonging at that time to the pope and
being governed by a vice-legate, was considered as foreign territory.
There he found his daughter, Madame d'Urban, who did all she could to
induce him to stay with her; but to do so would have been to flout Louis
XIV's orders too publicly, and the marquis was afraid to remain so much
in evidence lest evil should befall him; he accordingly retired to the
little village of l'Isle, built in a charming spot near the fountain
of Vaucluse; there he was lost sight of; none ever heard him spoken of
again, and when I myself travelled in the south of France in 1835, I
sought in vain any trace of the obscure and forgotten death which closed
so turbulent and stormy an existence.

As, in speaking of the last adventures of the Marquis de Ganges, we have
mentioned the name of Madame d'Urban, his daughter, we cannot exempt
ourselves from following her amid the strange events of her life,
scandalous though they may be; such, indeed, was the fate of this
family, that it was to occupy the attention of France through well-nigh
a century, either by its crimes or by its freaks.

On the death of the marquise, her daughter, who was barely six years
old, had remained in the charge of the dowager Marquise de Ganges, who,
when she had attained her twelfth year, presented to her as her husband
the Marquis de Perrant, formerly a lover of the grandmother herself. The
marquis was seventy years of age, having been born in the reign of Henry
IV; he had seen the court of Louis XIII and that of Louis XIV's youth,
and he had remained one of its most elegant and favoured nobles; he had
the manners of those two periods, the politest that the world has known,
so that the young girl, not knowing as yet the meaning of marriage
and having seen no other man, yielded without repugnance, and thought
herself happy in becoming the Marquise de Perrant.

The marquis, who was very rich, had quarrelle