oung friend to Europe,
induced the more by finding that the latter's mother, a Frenchwoman, had
left him such another bronze medal as he knew his wife to have had.

Unhappily, his wife had perished in Siberia, without his knowing it, any
more than he did, that she had left twin daughters, Rose and Blanche.
Fortunately for them, one who had served their father in the Grenadiers
of the Guard. Francis Baudoin, nicknamed Dagobert, undertook to fulfil
the dying mother's wishes, inspired by the medal. Saving a check at
Leipsic, where one Morok the lion-tamer's panther had escaped from its
cage and killed Dagobert's horse, and a subsequent imprisonment (which
the Wandering Jew's succoring hand had terminated) the soldier and his
orphan charges had reached Paris in safety and in time. But there, a
renewal of the foe's attempt had gained its end. By skillful devices,
Dagobert and his son Agricola were drawn out of the way while Rose and
Blanche Simon were decoyed into a nunnery, under the eyes of Dagobert's
wife. But she had been bound against interfering by the influence of the
Jesuit confessional. The fourth was M. Hardy, a manufacturer, and the
fifth, Jacques Rennepont, a drunken scamp of a workman, who were more
easily fended off, the latter in a sponging house, the former by
a friend's lure. Adrienne de Cardoville, daughter of the Count of
Rennepont, who had also been Duke of Cardoville, was the lady who had
been unwarrantably placed in the lunatic asylum. The fifth, unaware
of the medal, was Gabriel, a youth, who had been brought up, though
a foundling, in Dagobert's family, as a brother to Agricola. He had
entered holy orders, and more, was a Jesuit, in name though not in
heart. Unlike the others, his return from abroad had been smoothed. He
had signed away all his future prospects, for the benefit of the order
of Loyola, and, moreover, executed a more complete deed of transfer on
the day, the 13th of February, 1832, when he, alone of the heirs, stood
in the room of the house, No. 3, Rue St. Francois, claiming what was a
vast surprise for the Jesuits, who, a hundred and fifty years
before, had discovered that Count Marius de Rennepont had secreted a
considerable amount of his wealth, all of which had been confiscated to
them, in those painful days of dragoonings, and the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes. They had bargained for some thirty or forty millions of
francs to be theirs, by educating Gabriel into resigning his in