aire. So wise,
so proud, so little vain, so strong in health and wealth and honor,
one would have said nothing less than an earthquake could shake
this gentleman and his house. Yet both were shaken, though rooted by
centuries to the soil; and by no vulgar earthquake.

For years France had bowed in silence beneath two galling burdens--a
selfish and corrupt monarchy, and a multitudinous, privileged, lazy, and
oppressive aristocracy, by whom the peasant was handled like a Russian
serf. [Said peasant is now the principal proprietor of the soil.]

The lower orders rose upon their oppressors, and soon showed themselves
far blacker specimens of the same breed. Law, religion, humanity, and
common sense, hid their faces; innocent blood flowed in a stream, and
terror reigned. To Monsieur de Beaurepaire these republicans--murderers
of women, children, and kings--seemed the most horrible monsters nature
had ever produced; he put on black, and retired from society; he felled
timber, and raised large sums of money upon his estate. And one day he
mounted his charger, and disappeared from the chateau.

Three months after this, a cavalier, dusty and pale, rode into the
courtyard of Beaurepaire, and asked to see the baroness. She came to
him; he hung his head and held her out a letter.

It contained a few sad words from Monsieur de Laroche-jaquelin. The
baron had just fallen in La Vendee, fighting for the Crown.

From that hour till her death the baroness wore black.

The mourner would have been arrested, and perhaps beheaded, but for a
friend, the last in the world on whom the family reckoned for any solid
aid. Dr. Aubertin had lived in the chateau twenty years. He was a man of
science, and did not care a button for money; so he had retired from
the practice of medicine, and pursued his researches at ease under
the baron's roof. They all loved him, and laughed at his occasional
reveries, in the days of prosperity; and now, in one great crisis, the
protege became the protector, to their astonishment and his own. But it
was an age of ups and downs. This amiable theorist was one of the oldest
verbal republicans in Europe. And why not? In theory a republic is
the perfect form of government: it is merely in practice that it is
impossible; it is only upon going off paper into reality, and trying
actually to self-govern limited nations, after heating them white hot
with the fire of politics and the bellows of bombast--that the thing
reso