peerage during the Hundred Days, and passed that period on his estate
at Serizy.

After the second fall of the Emperor, he became once more a
privy-councillor, was appointed vice-president of the Council of State,
and liquidator, on behalf of France, of claims and indemnities demanded
by foreign powers. Without personal assumption, without ambition even,
he possessed great influence in public affairs. Nothing of importance
was done without consulting him; but he never went to court, and was
seldom seen in his own salons. This noble life, devoting itself from
its very beginning to work, had ended by becoming a life of incessant
toil. The count rose at all seasons by four o'clock in the morning,
and worked till mid-day, attended to his functions as peer of France
and vice-president of the Council of State in the afternoons, and went
to bed at nine o'clock. In recognition of such labor, the King had
made him a knight of his various Orders. Monsieur de Serizy had long
worn the grand cross of the Legion of honor; he also had the orders of
the Golden Fleece, of Saint-Andrew of Russia, that of the Prussian
Eagle, and nearly all the lesser Orders of the courts of Europe. No
man was less obvious, or more useful in the political world than he.
It is easy to understand that the world's honor, the fuss and feathers
of public favor, the glories of success were indifferent to a man of
this stamp; but no one, unless a priest, ever comes to life of this
kind without some serious underlying reason. His conduct had its
cause, and a cruel one.

In love with his wife before he married her, this passion had lasted
through all the secret unhappiness of his marriage with a widow,--a
woman mistress of herself before as well as after her second marriage,
and who used her liberty all the more freely because her husband