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.
The Marquis wrote in secret to his son, and occasionally went to see him among the Vosges, and embraced the lad, who inherited all his mother's intelligence and goodness.
Then the Vicomte returned like a truant schoolboy to Versailles, and the Marquise brought in her boy with an expression that seemed to say, "This is your boy! He is the one in whose veins runs only noble blood!"
In 1787 the Marquis was dangerously ill. His wife was devoted to him, and one day when he was in a critical condition she said, gently: