He was a large landed proprietor in the department, well connected, a breeder of cattle and a connoisseur in artistic matters. He it was who designed the historic costumes for processions and who presided over the committee formed for the erection of a statue of Jeanne d’Arc on the ramparts. He spent four months of the year in Paris, and had the reputation of being a man of gallantry. At fifty he preserved a slim and elegant figure. He was very popular with all three classes in the county town, and they had several times offered him the position of deputy. This he had refused, declaring that his leisure, as well as his independence, was dear to him. And people were curious about the reasons for his refusal.
M. de Terremondre had thought of buying Queen Marguerite’s house in order to turn it into a museum of local archæology and offer it to the town. But Madame Houssieu, the widowed owner of this house, had not responded to the overtures which he had made to her. Now more than eighty years of age, she lived in the old house, alone, save for a dozen cats. She was supposed to be rich and miserly. All that could be done was to wait for her death. Every time that he entered Paillot’s shop, M. de Terremondre asked the bookseller:
“Is Queen Marguerite still in the land of the living?”
And M. Paillot replied that assuredly one morning she would be found dead in her bed, living shut up alone at her age. Meanwhile, he dreaded her setting his house on fire. This was her neighbour’s constant fear. He lived in terror lest the old lady should burn down her wooden house and his along with it.
Madame Houssieu interested M. de Terremondre greatly. He was inquisitive about all that Queen Marguerite, as he called her, said and did. At the last visit which he had paid to her, she had shown him a bad Restoration engraving representing the Duchess of Angoulême pressing to her heart the portraits of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette enclosed in a medallion. This engraving, set in a black frame, hung in the ground-floor sitting-room. Showing it to him, Madame Houssieu said:
“That’s the portrait of Queen Marguerite, who long ago lived in this house.”
And M. de Terremondre asked himself how a portrait of Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France had, even by the dullest of minds, been taken for a portrait of Margaret of Scotland. He meditated on it for a month.
Then one day he exclaimed, as he entered Paillot’s shop:
“I’ve got it!”
And he explained to his friend the bookseller the very plausible reasons for this extraordinary confusion.