out of fashion of
late. Nobody was afraid to speak out before Prosper Alix; he was not a
spy; and though a cold-hearted man, except in the instance of his only
daughter, he never harmed anybody.

Very likely it was because he was the last person in the vicinity whom
anybody would have suspected of being applied to by the dispossessed
family, that the son of the Marquis' brother, a young man of promise, of
courage, of intellect, and of morals of decidedly a higher calibre than
those actually and traditionally imputed to the family, sought the aid
of the new possessor of the Chateau de Senanges, which had changed its
old title for that of the Maison Alix. The father of M. Paul de Senanges
had perished in the September massacres; his mother had been guillotined
at Lyons; and he--who had been saved by the interposition of a young
comrade, whose father had, in the wonderful rotations of the wheel of
Fate, acquired authority in the place where he had once esteemed the
notice of the nephew of the Marquis a crowning honor for his son--had
passed through the common vicissitudes of that dreadful time, which
would take a volume for their recital in each individual instance.

Paul de Senanges was a handsome young fellow, frank, high-spirited, and
of a brisk and happy temperament; which, however, modified by the many
misfortunes he had undergone, was not permanently changed. He had plenty
of capacity for enjoyment in him still; and as his position was very
isolated, and his mind had become enlightened on social and political
matters to an extent in which the men of his family would have
discovered utter degradation and the women diabolical possession, he
would not have been very unhappy if, under the new condition of things,
he could have lived in his native country and gained an honest
livelihood. But he could not do that, he was too thoroughly "suspect;"
the antecedents of his family were too powerful against him: his only
chance would have been to have gone into the popular camp as an extreme,
violent partisan, to have out-Heroded the revolutionary Herods; and that
Paul de Senanges was too honest to do. So he was reduced to being
thankful that he had escaped with his life, and to watching for an
opportunity of leaving France and gaining some country where the reign
of liberty, fraternity, and equality was not quite so oppressive.

The long-looked-for opportunity at length offered itself, and Paul de
Senanges was instructed by