winter he won seven lawsuits for various priests
of Besancon. At moments he could breathe freely at the thought of
his coming triumph. This intense desire, which made him work so many
interests and devise so many springs, absorbed the last strength of his
terribly overstrung soul. His disinterestedness was lauded, and he took
his clients' fees without comment. But this disinterestedness was, in
truth, moral usury; he counted on a reward far greater to him than all
the gold in the world.

In the month of October 1834 he had brought, ostensibly to serve
a merchant who was in difficulties, with money lent him by Leopold
Hannequin, a house which gave him a qualification for election. He had
not seemed to seek or desire this advantageous bargain.

"You are really a remarkable man," said the Abbe de Grancey, who, of
course, had watched and understood the lawyer. The Vicar-General had
come to introduce to him a Canon who needed his professional advice.
"You are a priest who has taken the wrong turning." This observation
struck Savarus.

Rosalie, on her part, had made up her mind, in her strong girl's head,
to get Monsieur de Savarus into the drawing-room and acquainted with
the society of the Hotel de Rupt. So far she had limited her desires
to seeing and hearing Albert. She had compounded, so to speak, and a
composition is often no more than a truce.

Les Rouxey, the inherited estate of the Wattevilles, was worth just ten
thousand francs a year; but in other hands it would have yielded a great
deal more. The Baron in his indifference--for his wife was to have, and
in fact had, forty thousand francs a year--left the management of les
Rouxey to a sort of factotum, an old servant of the Wattevilles named
Modinier. Nevertheless, whenever the Baron and his wife wished to go
out of the town, they went to les Rouxey, which is very picturesquely
situated. The chateau and the park were, in fact, created by the famous
Watteville, who in his active old age was passionately attached to this
magnificent spot.

Between two precipitous hills--little peaks with bare summits known
as the great and the little Rouxey--in the heart of a ravine where the
torrents from the heights, with the Dent de Vilard at their head, come
tumbling to join the lovely upper waters of the Doubs, Watteville had a
huge dam constructed, leaving two cuttings for the overflow. Above this
dam he made a beautiful lake, and below it two cascades; and these,
uniting