The owners of Frapesle are so associated with the dawn of my life's
happiness that I mingle them in all those memories I love to revive.
Later, and more especially in connection with his letters-patent, I
had the pleasure of doing my host some service. Monsieur de Chessel
enjoyed his wealth with an ostentation that gave umbrage to certain of
his neighbors. He was able to vary and renew his fine horses and
elegant equipages; his wife dressed exquisitely; he received on a
grand scale; his servants were more numerous than his neighbors
approved; for all of which he was said to be aping princes. The
Frapesle estate is immense. Before such luxury as this the Comte de
Mortsauf, with one family cariole,--which in Touraine is something
between a coach without springs and a post-chaise,--forced by limited
means to let or farm Clochegourde, was Tourangean up to the time when
royal favor restored the family to a distinction possibly unlooked
for. His greeting to me, the younger son of a ruined family whose
escutcheon dated back to the Crusades, was intended to show contempt
for the large fortune and to belittle the possessions, the woods, the
arable lands, the meadows, of a neighbor who was not of noble birth.
Monsieur de Chessel fully understood this. They always met politely;
but there was none of that daily intercourse or that agreeable
intimacy which ought to have existed between Clochegourde and
Frapesle, two estates separated only by the Indre, and whose
mistresses could have beckoned to each other from their windows.

Jealousy, however, was not the sole reason for the solitude in which
the Count de Mortsauf lived. His early education was that of the
children of great families,--an incomplete and superficial instruction
as to knowledge, but supplemented by the training of society, the
habits of a court life, and the exercise of important duties under the