where to go
and dependent upon the charity of the people--he was most impressed
with those dealing with the disregard of property. Shootings and
assassinations made him clench his fists, with threats of vengeance;
but the robberies authorized by the heads, the wholesale sackings by
superior order, followed by fire, appeared to him so unheard-of that
he was silent with stupefaction, his speech seeming to be temporarily
paralyzed. And a people with laws could wage war in this fashion, like a
tribe of Indians going to combat in order to rob! . . . His adoration of
property rights made him beside himself with wrath at these sacrileges.

He began to worry about his castle at Villeblanche. All that he owned in
Paris suddenly seemed to him of slight importance to what he had in his
historic mansion. His best paintings were there, adorning the gloomy
salons; there, too, the furnishings captured from the antiquarians after
an auctioneering battle, and the crystal cabinets, the tapestries, the
silver services.

He mentally reviewed all of these objects, not letting a single one
escape his inventory. Things that he had forgotten came surging up in
his memory, and the fear of losing them seemed to give them greater
lustre, increasing their size, and intensifying their value. All the
riches of Villeblanche were concentrated in one certain acquisition
which Desnoyers admired most of all; for, to his mind, it stood for
all the glory of his immense fortune--in fact, the most luxurious
appointment that even a millionaire could possess.

"My golden bath," he thought. "I have there my tub of gold."

This bath of priceless metal he had procured, after much financial
wrestling, from an auction, and he considered the purchase the
culminating achievement of his wealth. No one knew exactly its origin;
perhaps it had been the property of luxurious princes; perhaps it owed
its existence to the caprice of a demi-mondaine fond of display. He and
his had woven a legend around this golden cavity adorned with lions'
claws, dolphins and busts of naiads. Undoubtedly it was once a king's!
Chichi gravely affirmed that it had been Marie Antoinette's, and the
entire family thought that the home on the avenue Victor Hugo was
altogether too modest and plebeian to enshrine such a jewel. They
therefore agreed to put it in the castle, where it was greatly
venerated, although it was useless and solemn as a museum piece. . . .
And was he to permit the enemy i