He was a rough and gallant gentleman, who never hesitated to promulgate his opinions and beliefs. His only daughter, Lauriane, had married, at the age of twelve, her cousin Hélyon de Beuvre, aged sixteen.
The two children had been kept apart, with the greater ease in that the province was suddenly stirred by a commotion in which Messieurs de Beuvre felt that they were in duty bound to take part. They left La Motte on the very day of the marriage, to go to the succor of the Duchesse de Nevers, who had declared for the Prince de Condé, and who was besieged in her good city by Monsieur de Montigny—François de la Grange.
While making a bold attempt to force his way into Nevers, under the eyes of the Catholics, young Hélyon was killed. On his return from that campaign, therefore, Monsieur de Beuvre had the painful task of informing his darling daughter that she had passed without transition from the state of a virgin to that of a widow.
Lauriane[6] wept bitterly for her young cousin. But can a maiden weep incessantly at twelve years of age? And then her father gave her such a lovely doll!—a doll with a dress of cloth of silver, and red velvet slippers pinked like a crab's tail! And then, when she was fourteen, he gave her such a pretty little horse, from Monsieur le Prince's own stud! And then, too, Lauriane, who, at the time of her marriage, was only a pale, slender chit, became at fifteen a dainty blonde, so graceful and rosy and lovable, that there was no great danger that she would remain a widow.
But she was so happy with her father, and reigned so absolutely in the little château he had given her by way of dowry, that she felt in no manner of haste to enter the marriage state a second time. Was she not called madame? And is not the childish desire to be so called one of the most potent reasons which induce young girls to marry?—that and the gifts and the fêtes and the wedding trousseau?
"I have already had all the joys and all the sorrows of married life," Lauriane would say artlessly.
And yet, although he had a considerable fortune, managed by him with great prudence, to which his retired life enabled him to add materially, Monsieur de Beuvre did not find it a simple matter to arrange a second marriage for his daughter.
He had embraced the cause of the Reformed religion at the moment that that cause, drained of men and of money, had no other alternative in our provinces than to keep in the shadow and obtain toleration.
Everybody in his neighborhood was a Catholic, or pretended to be; for, in Berry, Calvinism had only a single moment of power and a single real stronghold. But
The year fifteen sixty-two