They had seen Mademoiselle de La Bastie when they were staying
at the Vilquins, and their solicitude for the impoverished head of their
house now became active.

"If Mademoiselle de La Bastie is really as rich as she is beautiful,"
said the aunt of the young duke, "she is the best match in the province.
_She_ at least is noble."

The last words were aimed at the Vilquins, with whom they had not been
able to come to terms, after incurring the humiliation of staying in
that bourgeois household.

Such were the little events which, contrary to the rules of Aristotle
and of Horace, precede the introduction of another person into our
story; but the portrait and the biography of this personage, this
late arrival, shall not be long, taking into consideration his own
diminutiveness. The grand equerry shall not take more space here than
he will take in history. Monsieur le Duc d'Herouville, offspring of the
matrimonial autumn of the last governor of Normandy, was born during the
emigration in 1799, at Vienna. The old marechal, father of the present
duke, returned with the king in 1814, and died in 1819, before he was
able to marry his son. He could only leave him the vast chateau of
Herouville, the park, a few dependencies, and a farm which he had bought
back with some difficulty; all of which returned a rental of about
fifteen thousand francs a year. Louis XVIII. gave the post of grand
equerry to the son, who, under Charles X., received the usual pension of
twelve thousand francs which was granted to the pauper peers of France.
But what were these twenty-seven thousand francs a year and the salary
of grand equerry to such a family? In Paris, of course, the young duke
used the king's coaches, and had a mansion provided for him in the rue
Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, near the royal stables; his salary paid for
his winters in the city, and his twenty-seven thousand francs for the
summers in Normandy. If this noble personage was still a bachelor he was
less to blame than his aunt, who was not versed in La Fontaine's fables.
Mademoiselle d'Herouville made enormous pretensions wholly out of
keeping with the spirit of the times; for great names, without the money
to keep them up, can seldom win rich heiresses among the higher French
nobility, who are themselves embarrassed to provide for their sons under
the new law of the equal division of property. To marry the young Duc
d'Herouville, it was necessary to conciliate the great banking-ho