That was, as we have said, the honest gentleman’s foible—almost his sole one; he secretly worshipped rank, and often sighed to think that he, who might—and, he sometimes added to himself, should—have been a De Rohan was only a De Boisrobert, barely a gentleman, by virtue of the lands his money had bought. Yet, if not the rose, he had at least lived near the rose. The son of a notary himself, he was yet distantly connected with one of the noblest names in France, as he was by no means slow in making folks aware.
“My good cousin, De Beaumanoir,” he would say in an off-hand way, pronouncing the name tout sec, like the provincial ladies in the Roman Comique, though to his face he never ventured to address him otherwise than as M. le Comte—“my good cousin De Beaumanoir writes me that he is to visit Saint-Aignan at his country-seat, and will have me to be of the party.”
Or, mysteriously: “The army—but this, you conceive, my friend, is between ourselves—a secret, mind you, of state—the army moves on Flanders this week. I have it direct from Beaumanoir.”
It was then, as you may read in Scarron’s sprightly pages, a common ambition of provincial gentlemen to be thought on familiar terms with the great folks of the court. Truly, an extraordinary time!
At these naïve confidences the curé, who knew his friend’s failing, but respected his virtues, smiled, if at all, to himself.
But M. de Boisrobert’s reverence for his noble kinsman went further than talking of him in season and out of season. He gave a more substantial proof of his regard in making him his sole heir. “The money should go with the title,” he said; “the family must be kept up.” It seemed to him a little price to pay for the privilege of being admitted for a month or two in the year to the rather frigid hospitality of the Hôtel Beaumanoir, of being nightly snubbed by the bluest blood in France, and of having down a great man or two for a day in the shooting season, to convert the Château Boisrobert to his enamored fancy into a new Versailles. His noble cousin he would gladly have had stay longer; but the count, after yawning through forty-eight hours of ennui, invariably left. The lands of Boisrobert he wanted; its simple and placid life he could not stomach. His palate was seasoned to higher flavors.
Not to put too fine a point on it, M. the Count de Beaumanoir was as insolent, imperious, and ungrateful a scoundrel as was to be found in a court where gentry of his pattern were rather a drug. Had it not been that he enjoyed the confidence and familiarity of a still greater rogue than himself—no less a one, to wit, than Monsieur, the brother of the Most Christian King—he would long since have come to grief. He was more than suspected of a share in the mysterious poisoning of the hapless Henrietta of Orleans, and it was only the credit of his patron and his own well-known courage and skill as a swordsman that kept these doubts from taking form.
Such was the heir whom our worthy M. de Boisrobert had selected for the reversion of his vast estates; and his promise once given, the count determined that it should be kept.
II.
Daybreak of a pleasant morning in October, 1681. In the court-yard and stables of the Château de Boisrobert, and in the great farm-yard near by, all is bustle and confusion. Grooms and footmen, herdsmen and farm-servants, are scurrying to and fro, with lanterns and lighted torches, through the gray dawn, tumbling over one another in their haste, shrieking out contradictory orders at the top of their lungs, clamoring and making all the noise possible, as though they had taken a contract for the purpose and felt they had but a limited time to fulfil it. In the farm-yard the heavy Norman horses are being harnessed, with collars that would be in themselves a load for a horse of our degenerate days, to the unwieldy Norman carts, already loaded with huge sacks of wheat and barley; further on, in the barns, a prodigious lowing and bleating and bellowing tell where Pierrot and Hugues are marshalling their herds; in the court-yard, saddled and bridled, are stamping and snorting the steeds which shall bear M. de Boisrobert and his bodyguard of two armed domestics to the great fair of Moulin-la-Forêt. Himself booted and spurred for the journey, that gentleman stands upon the terrace of the château, overlooking these preparations; chiding here, encouraging there, animating all by word and gesture. M. de Boisrobert has not been a nobleman long enough to forget that he is a farmer, and prefers to be his own steward. He finds it saves time and temper as well as money.