ure a chance of, the countdom, the marquisate, and the mountains of
iron and gold. (Of the latter she has got a good share out of her lover
already.) The plan is that Villanera shall marry some girl (of noble
birth but feeble health and no fortune), which will, according to French
law, effect or at least permit the legitimation of the little Marques de
las Montes de Hierro--certain further possibilities being left
ostensibly to Providence, but, in Madame Chermidy's private intentions,
to the care of quite another Power. The Dowager Countess de
Villanera--rather improbably, but not quite impossibly--accepts this,
being, though proud, willing to derogate a little to make sure of an
heir to the House of Villanera with at any rate a portion (the
sceptical would say a rather doubtful portion[424]) of its own blood.

Villanera himself, though in most ways the soul of honour, accepts this
shady scheme chiefly through blind devotion to his mistress; and it only
remains to find a family whose poverty, if not their will, consents to
sell their daughter. Through the agency of that stock and pet French
novel-character, a doctor who is very clever, very benevolent, very
sceptical, and not over-scrupulous, the exact material for the mischief
is found. There is an old Duc de la Tour-D'Embleuse, who, half-ruined by
the original Revolution, has been almost completely so by that of 1830,
has thrown away what remained, and has become an amiable and adored but
utterly selfish burden on his angelic wife and daughter, the latter of
whom, like so many of the heroines of the 'fifties, especially in
France, is an all but "given-up" _poitrinaire_. The price of the
bargain--an "inscription" of fifty thousand francs a year in Rentes--is
offered on the very day when the family has come to its last _sou_;
accepted, after short and sham refusal, by the duke; acquiesced in
unselfishly by the mother, who despairs of saving her husband and
daughter from starvation in any other way; and submitted to by the
daughter herself in a spirit of martyrdom, strengthened by the certainty
that it is but for a little while. How the situation works out to an end
of liberal but not excessive poetical justice, the reader may discover
for himself: the book being, though not a masterpiece, nor even very
high in the second rank, quite worth reading. One or two things may be
noticed. The first is a really clever sketch, the best thing perhaps in
About's novel-work, of the p