moment over some serious charge, with public opinion to back him up.
The young Count's worst tendencies, moreover, were insidiously
encouraged by two or three young men who followed in his train, paid
court to him, won his favor, and flattered and obeyed him, with a view
to confirming his belief in a noble's supremacy; and all this at a
time when a noble's one chance of preserving his power lay in using it
with the utmost discretion for half a century to come.

Du Croisier hoped to reduce the d'Esgrignons to the last extremity of
poverty; he hoped to see their castle demolished, and their lands sold
piecemeal by auction, through the follies which this harebrained boy
was pretty certain to commit. This was as far as he went; he did not
think, with President du Ronceret, that Victurnien was likely to give
justice another kind of hold upon him. Both men found an ally for
their schemes of revenge in Victurnien's overweening vanity and love
of pleasure. President du Ronceret's son, a lad of seventeen, was
admirably fitted for the part of instigator. He was one of the Count's
companions, a new kind of spy in du Croisier's pay; du Croisier taught
him his lesson, set him to track down the noble and beautiful boy
through his better qualities, and sardonically prompted him to
encourage his victim in his worst faults. Fabien du Ronceret was a
sophisticated youth, to whom such a mystification was attractive; he
had precisely the keen brain and envious nature which finds in such a
pursuit as this the absorbing amusement which a man of an ingenious
turn lacks in the provinces.

In three years, between the ages of eighteen and one-and-twenty,
Victurnien cost poor Chesnel nearly eighty thousand francs! And this
without the knowledge of Mlle. Armande or the Marquis. More than half
of the money had been spent in buying off lawsuits; the lad's