Madame de Lamotte, having greeted the cure, looked at the monk, who was a
stranger to her. A word or two explained matters, and she took her
husband's arm, declining to answer any questions until she reached the
louse, and laughing at his curiosity.

Pierre-Etienne de Saint-Faust de Lamotte, one of the king's equerries,
seigneur of Grange-Flandre, Valperfond, etc., had married Marie-Francoise
Perier in 1760. Their fortune resembled many others of that period: it
was more nominal than actual, more showy than solid. Not that the
husband and wife had any cause for self-reproach, or that their estates
had suffered from dissipation; unstained by the corrupt manners of the
period, their union had been a model of sincere affection, of domestic
virtue and mutual confidence. Marie-Francoise was quite beautiful enough
to have made a sensation in society, but she renounced it of her own
accord, in order to devote herself to the duties of a wife and mother.
The only serious grief she and her husband had experienced was the loss
of two young children. Edouard, though delicate from his birth, had
nevertheless passed the trying years of infancy and early adolescence; he
was them nearly fourteen. With a sweet and rather effeminate expression,
blue eyes and a pleasant smile, he was a striking likeness of his mother.
His father's affection exaggerated the dangers which threatened the boy,
and in his eyes the slightest indisposition became a serious malady; his
mother shared these fears, and in consequence of this anxiety Edouard's
education had been much neglected. He had been brought up at
Buisson-Souef, and allowed to run wild from morning till night, like a
young fawn, exercising the vigour and activity of its limbs. He had
still the simplicity and general ignorance of a child of nine or ten.

The necessity of appearing at court and suitably defraying the expenses