“Amélie was too good and too fair,” the dame said, “to become any man's portion but Pierre Philibert's!”
The dame's Huguenot prejudices melted like wax in her presence, until Amélie almost divided with Grande Marie, the saint of the Cevennes, the homage and blessing of Dame Rochelle.
Those were days of unalloyed delight which she spent in superintending the arrangements for the marriage which had been fixed for the festivities of Christmas.
It was to be celebrated on a scale worthy of the rank of the heiress of Repentigny and of the wealth of the Philiberts. The rich Bourgeois, in the gladness of his heart, threw open all his coffers, and blessed with tears of happiness the money he flung out with both hands to honor the nuptials of Pierre and Amélie.
The Bourgeois was profoundly happy during those few brief days of Indian summer. As a Christian, he rejoiced that the long desolating war was over. As a colonist, he felt a pride that, unequal as had been the struggle, New France remained unshorn of territory, and by its resolute defence had forced respect from even its enemies. In his eager hope he saw commerce revive, and the arts and comforts of peace take the place of war and destruction. The husbandman would now reap for himself the harvest he had sown, and no longer be crushed by the exactions of the Friponne!
There was hope for the country. The iniquitous régime of the Intendant, which had pleaded the war as its justification, must close, the Bourgeois thought, under the new conditions of peace. The hateful monopoly of the Grand Company must be overthrown by the constitutional action of the Honnêtes Gens, and its condemnation by the Parliament of Paris, to which an appeal would presently be carried, it was hoped, would be secured.
The King was quarreling with the Jesuits. The Molinists were hated by La Pompadour, and he was certain His Majesty would never hold a lit de justice to command the registration of the decrees issued in his name by the Intendant of New France after they had been in form condemned by the Parliament of Paris.
The Bourgeois still reclined very still on his easy chair. He was not asleep. In the daytime he never slept. His thoughts, like the dame's, reverted to Pierre. He meditated the repurchase of his ancestral home in Normandy and the restoration of its ancient honors for his son.
Personal and political enmity might prevent the reversal of his own unjust condemnation, but Pierre had won renown in the recent campaigns. He was favored with the friendship of many of the noblest personages in France, who would support his suit for the restoration of his family honors, while the all-potent influence of money, the open sesame of every door in the palace of Versailles, would not be spared to advance his just claims.
The crown of the Bourgeois's ambition would be to see Pierre restored to his ancestral château as the Count de Philibert, and Amélie as its noble châtelaine, dispensing happiness among the faithful old servitors and vassals of his family, who in all these long years of his exile never forgot their brave old seigneur who had been banished to New France.