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HE count slept, Valerie meditated, François waited, and Gaston prowled. The fact was, that this young man, although half a century before the time of Voltaire and Rousseau, was a bit of a philosopher on his own account, and, banished from the polished circles of the court and the smiles of Madame de Montespan, could solace himself very tolerably with certain village companions, not as refined certainly, but perhaps quite as edifying to his moral character, as the cavaliers and grandes dames of Versailles. When, therefore, the Count de Montarnaud left the salon to secure his beauty-sleep, Monsieur le Vicomte, throwing a dark cloak about him, strolled down through the garden and over a field or two by a way quite familiar to his feet since boyhood, to the auberge of the wretched village of Montarnaud, where he knew that a little circle of flatterers and vassals would hail his appearance with slavish delight.

But oh, the wheels within the wheels of even so tiny a microcosm as the Château de Montarnaud!

Mademoiselle Salerne, aged twenty-six, and not ill-looking, had allowed her heart as she would have said, her fancy as we will call it, to go astray, secretly to be