he
gabble, and he thought day and night upon his vengeance. He meant to
strike du Bousquier to the heart.

The poor abbe fully understood the baseness of this first and last
love of his niece; he shuddered as, little by little, he perceived the
hypocritical nature of his nephew and his treacherous manoeuvres. Though
du Bousquier restrained himself, as he thought of the abbe's property,
and wished not to cause him vexation, it was his hand that dealt the
blow that sent the old priest to his grave. If you will interpret the
word _intolerance_ as _firmness of principle_, if you do not wish to
condemn in the catholic soul of the Abbe de Sponde the stoicism which
Walter Scott has made you admire in the puritan soul of Jeanie Deans'
father; if you are willing to recognize in the Roman Church the Potius
mori quam foedari that you admire in republican tenets,--you will
understand the sorrow of the Abbe de Sponde when he saw in his niece's
salon the apostate priest, the renegade, the pervert, the heretic, that
enemy of the Church, the guilty taker of the Constitutional oath. Du
Bousquier, whose secret ambition was to lay down the law to the town,
wished, as a first proof of his power, to reconcile the minister of
Saint-Leonard with the rector of the parish, and he succeeded. His wife
thought he had accomplished a work of peace where the immovable abbe saw
only treachery. The bishop came to visit du Bousquier, and seemed glad
of the cessation of hostilities. The virtues of the Abbe Francois
had conquered prejudice, except that of the aged Roman Catholic, who
exclaimed with Cornelle, "Alas! what virtues do you make me hate!"

The abbe died when orthodoxy thus expired in the diocese.

In 1819, the property of the Abbe de Sponde increased Madame du
Bousquier's income from real estate to twenty-five thousand francs
without counting Prebaudet or the house in the Val-Noble. About this
time du Bousquier returned to his wife the capital of her savings which
she had yielded to him; and he made her use it in purchasing lands
contiguous to Prebaudet, which made that domain one of the most
considerable in the department, for the estates of the Abbe de Sponde
also adjoined it. Du Bousquier thus passed for one of the richest men of
the department. This able man, the constant candidate of the liberals,
missing by seven or eight votes only in all the electoral battles fought
under the Restoration, and who ostensibly repudiated the liberals by