he little suspects who is trying to pluck
the best roses out of his garland!"

Pere Guerbet, the collector of Soulanges, was the wit, that is to say,
the jovial companion of the little town, and a hero in Madame Soudry's
salon. Soudry's speech gives a fair idea of the opinion which now grew
up against the master of Les Aigues from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes,
and wherever else the public mind could be reached and poisoned by
Gaubertin.

The installation of Sibilet took place in the autumn of 1817. The year
1818 went by without the general being able to set foot at Les Aigues,
for his approaching marriage with Mademoiselle de Troisville, which was
celebrated in January, 1819, kept him the greater part of the summer
near Alencon, in the country-house of his prospective father-in-law.
General Montcornet possessed, besides Les Aigues and a magnificent house
in Paris, some sixty thousand francs a year in the Funds and the salary
of a retired lieutenant-general. Though Napoleon had made him a count
of the Empire and given him the following arms, a field quarterly, the
first, azure, bordure or, three pyramids argent; the second, vert, three
hunting horns argent; the third, gules, a cannon or on a gun-carriage
sable, and, in chief, a crescent or; the fourth, or, a crown vert,
with the motto (eminently of the middle ages!), "Sound the
charge,"--Montcornet knew very well that he was the son of a
cabinet-maker in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, though he was quite ready
to forget it. He was eaten up with the desire to be a peer of France,
and dreamed of his grand cordon of the Legion of honor, his Saint-Louis
cross, and his income of one hundred and forty thousand francs. Bitten
by the demon of aristocracy, the sight of the blue ribbon put him beside
himself. The gallant cuirassier of Essling would have licked up the
mud on the Pont-Royal to be invited to the house of a Navarreins, a
Lenoncourt, a Grandlieu, a Maufrigneuse, a d'Espard, a Vandenesse, a
Verneuil, a Herouville, or a Chaulieu.

From 1818, when the impossibility of a change in favor of the Bonaparte
family was made clear to him, Montcornet had himself trumpeted in the
faubourg Saint-Germain by the wives of some of his friends, who offered
his hand and heart, his mansion and his fortune in return for an
alliance with some great family.

After several attempts, the Duchesse de Carigliano found a match for the
general in one of the three branches of the Troisville family,-