is shattered fortunes he
engaged, at the advice of Lau, in those disastrous financial enterprises
that paved the way for the Revolution. He failed completely in his
ventures, left Paris insolvent, and took refuge in the Chateau de
Chamondrin, where he hoped to escape the wrath of his creditors. But
they complained to the king, and brought such influence to bear upon him
that Louis XV., the Well-beloved, who had just ascended the throne,
informed the Marquis de Chamondrin that he would allow him three months
in which to choose between the payment of his debts and incarceration in
the Bastile. The Marquis did not hesitate long. He sold all his property
with the exception of this chateau and paid his debts. But when this
plebeian duty was accomplished, it left him in receipt of an extremely
modest income. Poverty had fallen upon this house at the very time that
the favor of the king was withdrawn from it, and this two-fold
misfortune was quickly followed by the birth of a son and the loss of
his wife.

These afflictions completely prostrated this man who was wholly
unprepared to meet them. He shut himself up in his chateau, and there,
far from the pleasures for which he pined, far from the friends who had
forgotten him, cursing God and man for his misfortunes, he lapsed into a
misanthropy that rendered him nervous and eccentric almost to madness.
He lived twenty years in this way, apparently taking no pleasure or
interest in his son, whose youth was gloomy and whose education was
entrusted entirely to the cure of a neighboring village. He died in
1765, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the first half of which
had proved so fatal to the prosperity of his house.

His son, Hector--the same who had sheltered Tiepoletta--found himself,
when he became of age, the owner of a name famous in the courts of
Europe and upon many a field of battle, of an income of five thousand
pounds and of the Chateau de Chamondrin. He was a gentle, serious young
man of very simple tastes. He quickly resigned himself to the
situation. After a close examination of the condition of affairs, he
resolved to devote his life and all his efforts to the restoration of
the glory of his name. He married, two years after the death of his
father, the daughter of an impoverished Provencal nobleman, a lady whose
domestic virtues seemed likely to aid him in the execution of his plans.
He brought his wife home the day after their marriage and then said to
h