ose at break of day, assisted at
early mass, fulfilled, conscientiously, his administrative duties, took
his hurried meals in a boardinghouse, where he exchanged a few polite
remarks with his fellow inmates, then shut himself up in his room to
read Pascal or Bossuet until eleven o'clock.

He thus attained his twenty-seventh year, and it was into the calm of
this serious, cloister-like life, that the news fell of the death of
Claude de Buxieres and of the unexpected inheritance that had accrued to
him.

After entering into correspondence with the notary, M. Arbillot, and
becoming assured of the reality of his rights and of the necessity
of his presence at Vivey, he had obtained leave of absence from his
official duties, and set out for Haute Marne. On the way, he could not
help marvelling at the providential interposition which would enable him
to leave a career for which he felt he had no vocation, and to pursue
his independent life, according to his own tastes, and secured from any
fear of outside cares. According to the account given by the notary,
Claude de Buxieres's fortune might be valued at two hundred thousand
francs, in furniture and other movables, without reckoning the chateau
and the adjacent woods. This was a much larger sum than had ever been
dreamed of by Julien de Buxieres, whose belongings did not amount in all
to three thousand francs. He made up his mind, therefore, that, as soon
as he was installed at Vivey, he would change his leave of absence to an
unlimited furlough of freedom. He contemplated with serene satisfaction
this perspective view of calm and solitary retirement in a chateau lost
to view in the depths of the forest, where he could in perfect security
give himself up to the studious contemplative life which he loved
so much, far from all worldly frivolities and restraint. He already
imagined himself at Vivey, shut up in his carefully selected library;
he delighted in the thought of having in future to deal only with the
country people, whose uncivilized ways would be like his own, and among
whom his timidity would not be remarked.

He arrived at Langres in the afternoon of a foggy October day, and
inquired immediately at the hotel how he could procure a carriage to
take him that evening to Vivey. They found him a driver, but, to his
surprise, the man refused to take the journey until the following
morning, on account of the dangerous state of the crossroads, where
vehicles might stick f