and to pray daily for
her. The image presented itself of this wife whom he adored, in the same
room, exposed to the same violence, destined perhaps to the same fate;
all this was enough to lead him to take positive action: he flung himself
into a post-chaise, reached Versailles, begged an audience of the king,
cast himself, with his wife's letter in his hand, at the feet of Louis
XIV, and besought him to compel his father to return into exile, where he
swore upon has honour that he would send him everything he could need in
order to live properly.

The king was not aware that the Marquis do Ganges had disobeyed the
sentence of banishment, and the manner in which he learned it was not
such as to make him pardon the contradiction of his laws. In consequence
he immediately ordered that if the Marquis de Ganges were found in France
he should be proceeded against with the utmost rigour.

Happily for the marquis, the Comte de Ganges, the only one of his
brothers who had remained in France, and indeed in favour, learned the
king's decision in time. He took post from Versailles, and making the
greatest haste, went to warn him of the danger that was threatening; both
together immediately left Ganges, and withdrew to Avignon. The district
of Venaissin, still belonging at that time to the pope and being governed
by a vice-legate, was considered as foreign territory. There he found
his daughter, Madame d'Urban, who did all she could to induce him to stay
with her; but to do so would have been to flout Louis XIV's orders too
publicly, and the marquis was afraid to remain so much in evidence lest
evil should befall him; he accordingly retired to the little village of
l'Isle, built in a charming spot near the fountain of Vaucluse; there he
was lost sight of; none ever heard him spoken of again, and when I myself
travelled in the south of France in 1835, I sought in vain any trace of
the obscure and forgotten death which closed so turbulent and stormy an
existence.

As, in speaking of the last adventures of the Marquis de Ganges, we have
mentioned the name of Madame d'Urban, his daughter, we cannot exempt
ourselves from following her amid the strange events of her life,
scandalous though they may be; such, indeed, was the fate of this family,
that it was to occupy the attention of France through well-nigh a
century, either by its crimes or by its freaks.

On the death of the marquise, her daughter, who was barely six years old