e most
agreeable financiers who had served under the Empire, and who was of
course presented by Monsieur de la Baudraye to his wife.

As soon as he was released from his functions, Monsieur de la Baudraye
returned to Paris to come to an understanding with some other debtors.
This time he was made a Referendary under the Great Seal, Baron, and
Officer of the Legion of Honor. He sold the appointment as Referendary;
and then the Baron de la Baudraye called on his last remaining debtors,
and reappeared at Sancerre as Master of Appeals, with an appointment
as Royal Commissioner to a commercial association established in the
Nivernais, at a salary of six thousand francs, an absolute sinecure. So
the worthy La Baudraye, who was supposed to have committed a financial
blunder, had, in fact, done very good business in the choice of a wife.

Thanks to sordid economy and an indemnity paid him for the estate
belonging to his father, nationalized and sold in 1793, by the year 1827
the little man could realize the dream of his whole life. By paying
four hundred thousand francs down, and binding himself to further
instalments, which compelled him to live for six years on the air as it
came, to use his own expression, he was able to purchase the estate of
Anzy on the banks of the Loire, about two leagues above Sancerre, and
its magnificent castle built by Philibert de l'Orme, the admiration of
every connoisseur, and for five centuries the property of the Uxelles
family. At last he was one of the great landowners of the province!
It is not absolutely certain that the satisfaction of knowing that an
entail had been created, by letters patent dated back to December 1820,
including the estates of Anzy, of La Baudraye, and of La Hautoy, was
any compensation to Dinah on finding herself reduced to unconfessed
penuriousness till 1835.

This sketch of the financial policy of the first Baron de la Baudraye
explains the man completely. Those who are familiar with the manias of
country folks will recognize in him the _land-hunger_ which becomes such
a consuming passion to the exclusion of every other; a sort of avarice
displayed in the sight of the sun, which often leads to ruin by a want
of balance between the interest on mortgages and the products of the
soil. Those who, from 1802 till 1827, had merely laughed at the little
man as they saw him trotting to Saint-Thibault and attending to his
business, like a merchant living on his vineyards, fou