"You are so tranquil, dear Julie, because he is dead. Happy is it for you that he is in his grave. Come, let us return."
They began to walk toward the cottage.
"And how would you spend your days, Julie, had you the choice of your own way of life?"
"I would take the vail. I would like to be a nun, and to die early, like sister Eugenie."
Lucille looked at her with undisguised astonishment.
"Take the vail!" she exclaimed, "so young, so pretty. Parbleu, I would rather work in the fields or beg my bread on the high-roads. Take the vail—no, no, no. Marguerite told me I had a great-aunt who took the vail, and three years after died mad in a convent in Paris. Ah, it is a sad life, Julie, it is a sad life!"
It was the wish of the Fermier-General that his nuptials should be celebrated with as much privacy as possible. The reader, therefore, will lose nothing by our dismissing the ceremony as rapidly as may be. Let it suffice to say, that it did take place, and to describe the arrangements with which it was immediately succeeded.
Though Monsieur Le Prun had become the purchaser of the Charrebourg estate, he did not choose to live upon it. About eight leagues from Paris he possessed a residence better suited to his tastes and plans. It was said to have once belonged to a scion of royalty, who had contrived it with a view to realizing upon earth a sort of Mahomedan paradise. Nothing indeed could have been better devised for luxury as well as seclusion. From some Romish legend attaching to its site, it had acquired the name of the Chateau des Anges, a title which unhappily did not harmonize with the traditions more directly connected with the building itself.
It was a very spacious structure, some of its apartments were even magnificent, and the entire fabric bore overpowering evidences, alike in its costly materials and finish, and in the details of its design, of the prodigal and voluptuous magnificence to which it owed its existence.
It was environed by lordly forests, circle within circle, which were pierced by long straight walks diverging from common centers, and almost losing themselves in the shadowy distance. Studded, too, with a series of interminable fishponds, encompassed by hedges of beech, yew, and evergreens of enormous height and impenetrable density, under whose emerald shadows water-fowl of all sorts, from the princely swan down to the humble water-hen, were sailing and gliding this way and that, like rival argosies upon the seas.