Standing midway between the novelists of the romantic school
and the writers of the realistic movement, he combined a sense
of the poetry of life with a gift for analysing the finer
shades of feeling. The plot of the "Romance of a Poor Young
Man" is certainly extraordinary; but in the present case some
allowance must be made for the fact that the hero is induced
to accept the humble position in which he finds himself by his
old family lawyer, who secretly designs to marry him to the
daughter of his new employers. A scheme of this sort would not
Strike a French reader as improbable, for marriage in France
is often more a business arrangement than a love affair.
Feuillet spent the latter part of his life in retirement, and
died on December 29, 1890.


_I.--A Nobleman in Difficulties_


Here I am, then, in the situation that Lawyer Laubépin obtained for me.
I am alone at last, thank goodness, sitting in a gloomy room in this old
Breton castle, in which the former steward to the Laroque family used to
live. My position is certainly very strange, but as Laubépin was
discreet, and did not tell his clients that he was sending them a new
steward in the person of the young Marquis of Champcey, perhaps I shall
not find my post very difficult. I was afraid that the Laroques were a
family of the vulgarly rich sort, like the dreadful persons who have
bought my father's lands. Laroque is a picturesque figure in his old
age, and though his widowed daughter-in-law is rather more commonplace,
his grand-daughter, Marguerite Laroque, is a nobly beautiful girl.