Beauvisage, the mother, and he believed in the energy and capacity of
a young man bold enough to have turned the campaign of 1814 to his
profit. Severine Grevin had her mother's fortune of sixty thousand
francs for her dower. Grevin was then over fifty; he feared to die,
and saw no chance of marrying his daughter as he wished under the
Restoration--for her, he had had ambition. Under these circumstances
he was shrewd enough to make Phileas ask her in marriage.

Severine Grevin, a well-trained young lady and handsome, was
considered at that time the best match in Arcis. In fact, an alliance
with the intimate friend of the senator Comte de Gondreville, peer of
France, was certainly a great honor for the son of a Gondreville
tenant-farmer. The widow Beauvisage, his mother, would have made any
sacrifice to obtain it; but on learning the success of her son, she
dispensed with the duty of giving him a _dot_,--a wise economy which
was imitated by the notary.

Thus was consummated the union of the son of a farmer formerly so
faithful to the Simeuse family with the daughter of its most cruel
enemy. It was, perhaps, the only application made of the famous saying
of Louis XVIII.: "Union and Oblivion."

On the second return of the Bourbons, Grevin's father-in-law, old
Doctor Varlet, died at the age of seventy-six, leaving two hundred
thousand francs in gold in his cellar, besides other property valued
at an equal sum. Thus Phileas and his wife had, outside of their
business, an assured income of thirty thousand francs a year.

The first two years of this marriage sufficed to show Madame Severine
and her father, Monsieur Grevin the absolute silliness of Phileas