courtyard of Beaurepaire, and asked to see the baroness. She came to
him; he hung his head and held her out a letter.

It contained a few sad words from Monsieur de Laroche-jaquelin. The
baron had just fallen in La Vendee, fighting for the Crown.

From that hour till her death the baroness wore black.

The mourner would have been arrested, and perhaps beheaded, but for a
friend, the last in the world on whom the family reckoned for any solid
aid. Dr. Aubertin had lived in the chateau twenty years. He was a man of
science, and did not care a button for money; so he had retired from
the practice of medicine, and pursued his researches at ease under
the baron's roof. They all loved him, and laughed at his occasional
reveries, in the days of prosperity; and now, in one great crisis, the
protege became the protector, to their astonishment and his own. But it
was an age of ups and downs. This amiable theorist was one of the oldest
verbal republicans in Europe. And why not? In theory a republic is
the perfect form of government: it is merely in practice that it is
impossible; it is only upon going off paper into reality, and trying
actually to self-govern limited nations, after heating them white hot
with the fire of politics and the bellows of bombast--that the thing
resolves itself into bloodshed silvered with moonshine.

Dr. Aubertin had for years talked and written speculative republicanism.
So they applied to him whether the baroness shared her husband's
opinions, and he boldly assured them she did not; he added, "She is a
pupil of mine." On this audacious statement they contented themselves
with laying a heavy fine on the lands of Beaurepaire.