self no longer in her debt. Could he
not restore the odd twelve hundred thousand as soon as the four and a
half per cents had risen above a hundred? He was now the greatest man
in Sancerre, with the exception of one--the richest proprietor in
France--whose rival he considered himself. He saw himself with an income
of a hundred and forty thousand francs, of which ninety thousand formed
the revenue from the lands he had entailed. Having calculated that
besides this net income he paid ten thousand francs in taxes, three
thousand in working expenses, ten thousand to his wife, and twelve
hundred to his mother-in-law, he would say in the literary circles of
Sancerre:

"I am reputed miserly, and said to spend nothing; but my outlay amounts
to twenty-six thousand five hundred francs a year. And I have still to
pay for the education of my two children! I daresay it is not a pleasing
fact to the Milauds of Nevers, but the second house of La Baudraye may
yet have as noble a center as the first.--I shall most likely go to
Paris and petition the King of the French to grant me the title of
Count--Monsieur Roy is a Count--and my wife would be pleased to be
Madame la Comtesse."

And this was said with such splendid coolness that no one would have
dared to laugh at the little man. Only Monsieur Boirouge, the Presiding
Judge, remarked:

"In your place, I should not be happy unless I had a daughter."

"Well, I shall go to Paris before long----" said the Baron.

In the early part of 1842 Madame de la Baudraye, feeling that she was to
Lousteau no more than a reserve in the background, had again sacrificed
herself absolutely to secure his comfort; she had resumed her black
raiment, but now it was in sign of mourning, for her pleasure was
turning to remorse. She was too often put to shame not to feel the
weight of the chain, and her mother found her sunk in those moods of
meditation into which visions of the future cast unhappy souls in a sort
of torpor.

Madame Piedefer, by the advice of her spiritual director, was on the
watch for the moment of exhaustion, which the priest told her would
inevitably supervene, and then she pleaded in behalf of the children.
She restricted herself to urging that Dinah and Lousteau should live
apart, not asking her to give him up. In real life these violent
situations are not closed as they are in books, by death or cleverly
contrived catastrophes; they end far less poetically--in disgust, in the
bligh