one of the oldest families of Languedoc. His ancestors had served France faithfully and had held positions of trust near the persons of the kings. The present Marquis had committed a fault not easily forgiven by the ancien régime. He had married the daughter of a farmer, when he was twenty, in spite of the threats of his family. This union was of short duration, for his wife died in giving birth to a son. This blow was so sudden that the young man abandoned himself to despair. He shut himself up from the world on an estate he had among the Vosges mountains, and lived only for his child.

The beloved dead, though of peasant blood, had been an extraordinary woman. She, young as she was, had thought much, and felt deeply the sufferings of her class. She pointed out to the Marquis how the people were weighed down by taxes, and how little their hard toil availed them.

"Friend," said Simonne, "thou art wealthy, thou belongest to the privileged class, give and speak. Open thy hand, and raise thy voice!"

She endeavored to awaken in his heart a noble ambition. He was twenty and he loved. Had she lived, Armand would, undoubtedly, have been one of the greatest actors in the crisis then preparing, but now that she was gone, he forgot the glorious legacy she had bequeathed to him. He detested the court, however, and determined that his son should grow up far away from its influences. Simon, therefore, passed his childhood among the mountains drinking in the delicious air, and growing as freely as a young tree.

But Armand was weak. His friends and family, who had fallen away from him at the time of his marriage, now sought to bring him back. He resisted for a time, but at last went to Versailles. The king received him proudly and said, "Monsieur de Fongereues, it is not well in you to abandon us thus. The throne needs its faithful supporters."

A few days later he was presented to Mademoiselle de Maillezais—her beauty was of that quality that dazzles rather than pleases. She made herself very attractive on this occasion, anxious to take back to the king this nobleman who had so nearly been lost.

In 1779, Armand married this lady. Simon, the peasant's son, was then five years of age. When his father spoke of him to his wife some little time after their marriage, she replied:

"You will, of course, do as you choose, but I should say that any change would be likely to injure his health."

The Marquis was glad to seize any excuse for keeping Simonne's son away from that society which his mother had so strongly condemned. It was with the feeling, therefore, that he was obeying the wishes of his beloved dead, that he left Simon among the mountains.

It was at this time that the war begun by the enemies of Nechar against his innovations reached its height. The nobles and the clergy, feeling their privileges attacked, organized against the Genoese banker a campaign in which he was to fall. The Maillezais family were Nechar's pitiless adversaries, and in spite of himself the Marquis was carried along with them. His wife had acquired a supremacy over him that daily increased. His weak nature was ever ready to be influenced by others, and his natural enthusiasm originally aroused by Simonne for another cause, was perverted to the profit of the ancien régime, and finally he was one of the first to applaud the words of Louis XVI., when he signed his name to an edict which inflicted on the country a new debt of four hundred and twenty million.

"It is legal because I wish it."

Nevertheless, the Marquis often thought of Simonne when he was alone. He recalled her beautiful, energetic face, her pathetic, eloquent words. Then he longed to see her son, whom his present wife hated. She herself had become a mother; the Vicomte Jean Talizac had been held at the baptismal font by the Queen Marie Antoinette.

The Marquise determined to oust Simon from his place in his father's heart. She but half succeeded in this, and was too wise to attack the memory of the dead.