g, strove to enhance by
every artifice of the toilet, his natural resemblance to King Henry IV,
who, according to a legend of which the family were inordinately proud,
had been the favored lover of a De Breville lady, and father of her
child --the frail one's husband having, in recognition of this fact,
been made a count and governor of a province.

A colleague of Monsieur Carre-Lamadon in the General Council, Count
Hubert represented the Orleanist party in his department. The story of
his marriage with the daughter of a small shipowner at Nantes had always
remained more or less of a mystery. But as the countess had an air of
unmistakable breeding, entertained faultlessly, and was even supposed to
have been loved by a son of Louis-Philippe, the nobility vied with
one another in doing her honor, and her drawing-room remained the most
select in the whole countryside--the only one which retained the old
spirit of gallantry, and to which access was not easy.

The fortune of the Brevilles, all in real estate, amounted, it was said,
to five hundred thousand francs a year.

These six people occupied the farther end of the coach, and represented
Society--with an income--the strong, established society of good people
with religion and principle.

It happened by chance that all the women were seated on the same side;
and the countess had, moreover, as neighbors two nuns, who spent the
time in fingering their long rosaries and murmuring paternosters and
aves. One of them was old, and so deeply pitted with smallpox that she
looked for all the world as if she had received a charge of shot full
in the face. The other, of sickly appearance, had a pretty but wasted
countenance, and a narrow, consumptive chest, sapped by that devouring
faith which is the making of martyrs and visionaries.

A man and woman, sitting opposite the two nuns, attracted all eyes.

The man--a well-known character--was Cornudet, the democrat, the terror
of all respectable people. For the past twenty years his big red beard
had been on terms of intimate acquaintance with the tankards of all
the republican cafes. With the help of his comrades and brethren he
had dissipated a respectable fortune left him by his father, an
old-established confectioner, and he now impatiently awaited the
Republic, that he might at last be rewarded with the post he had earned
by his revolutionary orgies. On the fourth of September--possibly as
the result of a practical joke--he