onsolation
of all the officers of good family quartered at Rouen. Pretty, slender,
graceful, she sat opposite her husband, curled up in her furs, and gazing
mournfully at the sorry interior of the coach.

Her neighbors, the Comte and Comtesse Hubert de Breville, bore one of the
noblest and most ancient names in Normandy. The count, a nobleman
advanced in years and of aristocratic bearing, strove to enhance by every
artifice of the toilet, his natural resemblance to King Henry IV, who,
according to a legend of which the family were inordinately proud, had
been the favored lover of a De Breville lady, and father of her child
--the frail one's husband having, in recognition of this fact, been
made a count and governor of a province.

A colleague of Monsieur Carre-Lamadon in the General Council, Count
Hubert represented the Orleanist party in his department. The story of
his marriage with the daughter of a small shipowner at Nantes had always
remained more or less of a mystery. But as the countess had an air of
unmistakable breeding, entertained faultlessly, and was even supposed to
have been loved by a son of Louis-Philippe, the nobility vied with one
another in doing her honor, and her drawing-room remained the most select
in the whole countryside--the only one which retained the old spirit
of gallantry, and to which access was not easy.

The fortune of the Brevilles, all in real estate, amounted, it was said,
to five hundred thousand francs a year.

These six people occupied the farther end of the coach, and represented
Society--with an income--the strong, established society of
good people with religion and principle.

It happened by chance that all the women were seated on the same side;
and the countess had, moreover, as neighbors two nuns, who spent the time
in fingering their long rosaries and murmuring paternosters and aves. One
of them was old, and so deeply pitted with smallpox that she looked for
all the world as if she had received a charge of shot full in the face.
The other, of sickly appearance, had a pretty but wasted countenance, and
a narrow, consumptive chest, sapped by that devouring faith which is the
making of martyrs and visionaries.

A man and woman, sitting opposite the two nuns, attracted all eyes.

The man--a well-known character--was Cornudet, the democrat,
the terror of all respectable people. For the past twenty years his big
red beard had been on terms of intimate acquaintance with the