usually is among country-people, showed teeth that were strong and
white as almonds, but irregular. Gleaming red whiskers framed this
face, which was white and yet mottled in spots. The hair, cropped
close in front and allowed to grow long at the sides and on the back
of the head, brought into relief, by its savage redness, all the
strange and fateful peculiarities of this singular face. The neck
which was short and thick, seemed to tempt the axe.

At this moment the sunbeams, falling in long lines athwart the group,
lighted up the three heads at which the dog from time to time glanced
up. The spot on which this scene took place was magnificently fine.
The _rond-point_ is at the entrance of the park of Gondreville, one of
the finest estates in France, and by far the finest in the departments
of the Aube; it boasts of long avenues of elms, a castle built from
designs by Mansart, a park of fifteen hundred acres enclosed by a
stone wall, nine large farms, a forest, mills, and meadows. This
almost regal property belonged before the Revolution to the family of
Simeuse. Ximeuse was a feudal estate in Lorraine; the name was
pronounced Simeuse, and in course of time it came to be written as
pronounced.

The great fortune of the Simeuse family, adherents of the House of
Burgundy, dates from the time when the Guises were in conflict with
the Valois. Richelieu first, and afterwards Louis XIV. remembered
their devotion to the factious house of Lorraine, and rebuffed them.
Then the Marquis de Simeuse, an old Burgundian, old Guiser, old
leaguer, old _frondeur_ (he inherited the four great rancors of the
nobility against royalty), came to live at Cinq-Cygne. The former
courtier, rejected at the Louvre, married the widow of the Comte de
Cinq-Cygne, younger branch of the famous family of Chargeboeuf, one of