which Louis XV forced upon him until after he had been imprisoned for
ten years in the Bastille; and he had abandoned none of the prejudices
of the old regime. In his youth, he followed the Comte de Chambord into
exile. In his old age, he refused a seat in the Chamber on the pretext
that a Sarzeau could only sit with his peers.

The incident stung him to the quick. Nothing could pacify him. He cursed
Lupin in good round terms, threatened him with every sort of punishment
and rounded on his daughter:

"There, if you had only married!... After all you had plenty of chances.
Your three cousins, Mussy, d'Emboise and Caorches, are noblemen of good
descent, allied to the best families, fairly well-off; and they are
still anxious to marry you. Why do you refuse them? Ah, because miss is
a dreamer, a sentimentalist; and because her cousins are too fat, or too
thin, or too coarse for her...."

She was, in fact, a dreamer. Left to her own devices from childhood, she
had read all the books of chivalry, all the colourless romances of
olden-time that littered the ancestral presses; and she looked upon life
as a fairy-tale in which the beauteous maidens are always happy, while
the others wait till death for the bridegroom who does not come. Why
should she marry one of her cousins when they were only after her money,
the millions which she had inherited from her mother? She might as well
remain an old maid and go on dreaming....

She answered, gently:

"You will end by making yourself ill, father. Forget this silly
business."

But how could he forget it? Every morning, some pin-prick renewed his
wound. Three days running, Angelique received a wonderful sheaf of
flowers, with Arsene Lupin's card peeping from it. The duke could not go
to his club but a friend accosted him:

"That was a good one to-day!"

"What was?"

"Why, your son-in-law's latest! Haven't you seen it? Here, read it for
yourself: 'M. Arsene Lupin is petitioning the Council of State for
permission to add his wife's name to his own and to be known henceforth
as Lupin de Sarzeau-Vendome.'"

And, the next day, he read:

"As the young bride, by virtue of an unrepealed decree of Charles
X, bears the title and arms of the Bourbon-Condes, of whom she is
the heiress-of-line, the eldest son of the Lupins de
Sarzeau-Vendome will be styled Prince de Bourbon-Conde."

And, the day after, an advertisement.

"Exhibition of Mlle. de Sarzeau-Ve