Monsieur de Watteville, a descendant of the famous Watteville, the
most successful and illustrious of murderers and renegades--his
extraordinary adventures are too much a part of history to be related
here--this nineteenth century Monsieur de Watteville was as gentle and
peaceable as his ancestor of the _Grand Siecle_ had been passionate
and turbulent. After living in the _Comte_ (La Franche Comte) like a
wood-louse in the crack of a wainscot, he had married the heiress of
the celebrated house of Rupt. Mademoiselle de Rupt brought twenty
thousand francs a year in the funds to add to the ten thousand francs
a year in real estate of the Baron de Watteville. The Swiss
gentleman's coat-of-arms (the Wattevilles are Swiss) was then borne as
an escutcheon of pretence on the old shield of the Rupts. The
marriage, arranged in 1802, was solemnized in 1815 after the second
Restoration. Within three years of the birth of a daughter all Madame
de Watteville's grandparents were dead, and their estates wound up.
Monsieur de Watteville's house was then sold, and they settled in the
Rue de la Prefecture in the fine old mansion of the Rupts, with an
immense garden stretching to the Rue du Perron. Madame de Watteville,
devout as a girl, became even more so after her marriage. She is one
of the queens of the saintly brotherhood which gives the upper circles
of Besancon a solemn air and prudish manners in harmony with the
character of the town.

Monsieur le Baron de Watteville, a dry, lean man devoid of
intelligence, looked worn out without any one knowing whereby, for he
enjoyed the profoundest ignorance; but as his wife was a red-haired
woman, and of a stern nature that became proverbial (we still say "as
sharp as Madame de Watteville"), some wits of the legal profession
declared that he had been worn against that rock--_Rupt_ is obviously