,
had remained in the charge of the dowager Marquise de Ganges, who, when
she had attained her twelfth year, presented to her as her husband the
Marquis de Perrant, formerly a lover of the grandmother herself. The
marquis was seventy years of age, having been born in the reign of Henry
IV; he had seen the court of Louis XIII and that of Louis XIV's youth,
and he had remained one of its most elegant and favoured nobles; he had
the manners of those two periods, the politest that the world has known,
so that the young girl, not knowing as yet the meaning of marriage and
having seen no other man, yielded without repugnance, and thought herself
happy in becoming the Marquise de Perrant.

The marquis, who was very rich, had quarrelled With his younger brother,
and regarded him with such hatred that he was marrying only to deprive
his brother of the inheritance that would rightfully accrue to him,
should the elder die childless. Unfortunately, the marquis soon
perceived that the step which he had taken, however efficacious in the
case of another man, was likely to be fruitless in his own. He did not,
however, despair, and waited two or three years, hoping every day that
Heaven would work a miracle in his favour; but as every day diminished
the chances of this miracle, and his hatred for his brother grew with the
impossibility of taking revenge upon him, he adopted a strange and
altogether antique scheme, and determined, like the ancient Spartans, to
obtain by the help of another what Heaven refused to himself.

The marquis did not need to seek long for the man who should give him his
revenge: he had in his house a young page, some seventeen or eighteen
years old, the son of a friend of his, who, dying without fortune, had on
his deathbed particularly commended the lad to the marquis. This young
man, a year older than his mistress, could not be continually about her
without falling passionately in love with her; and however much he might
endeavour to hide his love, the poor youth was as yet too little
practised in dissimulation to succeed iii concealing it from the eyes of
the marquis, who, after having at first observed its growth with
uneasiness, began on the contrary to rejoice in it, from the moment when
he had decided upon the scheme that we have just mentioned.

The marquis was slow to decide but prompt to execute. Having taken his
resolution, he summoned his page, and, after having made him promise
inviolable secr