title of Sire (or Lord) de la Baudraye, with the fief of the old and
genuine La Baudrayes. The descendants of the famous Captain la
Baudraye fell, sad to say, into one of the snares laid for heretics by
the new decrees, and were hanged--an unworthy deed of the great
King's.

Under Louis XV. Milaud de la Baudraye, from being a mere squire, was
made Chevalier, and had influence enough to obtain for his son a
cornet's commission in the Musketeers. This officer perished at
Fontenoy, leaving a child, to whom King Louis XVI. subsequently
granted the privileges, by patent, of a farmer-general, in remembrance
of his father's death on the field of battle.

This financier, a fashionable wit, great at charades, capping verses,
and posies to Chlora, lived in society, was a hanger-on to the Duc de
Nivernais, and fancied himself obliged to follow the nobility into
exile; but he took care to carry his money with him. Thus the rich
_emigre_ was able to assist more than one family of high rank.

In 1800, tired of hoping, and perhaps tired of lending, he returned to
Sancerre, bought back La Baudraye out of a feeling of vanity and
imaginary pride, quite intelligible in a sheriff's grandson, though
under the consulate his prospects were but slender; all the more so,
indeed, because the ex-farmer-general had small hopes of his heir's
perpetuating the new race of La Baudraye.

Jean Athanase Polydore Milaud de la Baudraye, his only son, more than
delicate from his birth, was very evidently the child of a man whose
constitution had early been exhausted by the excesses in which rich
men indulge, who then marry at the first stage of premature old age,