greatest haste, went to warn him of the danger that was threatening; both
together immediately left Ganges, and withdrew to Avignon. The district
of Venaissin, still belonging at that time to the pope and being governed
by a vice-legate, was considered as foreign territory. There he found
his daughter, Madame d'Urban, who did all she could to induce him to stay
with her; but to do so would have been to flout Louis XIV's orders too
publicly, and the marquis was afraid to remain so much in evidence lest
evil should befall him; he accordingly retired to the little village of
l'Isle, built in a charming spot near the fountain of Vaucluse; there he
was lost sight of; none ever heard him spoken of again, and when I myself
travelled in the south of France in 1835, I sought in vain any trace of
the obscure and forgotten death which closed so turbulent and stormy an
existence.

As, in speaking of the last adventures of the Marquis de Ganges, we have
mentioned the name of Madame d'Urban, his daughter, we cannot exempt
ourselves from following her amid the strange events of her life,
scandalous though they may be; such, indeed, was the fate of this family,
that it was to occupy the attention of France through well-nigh a
century, either by its crimes or by its freaks.

On the death of the marquise, her daughter, who was barely six years old,
had remained in the charge of the dowager Marquise de Ganges, who, when
she had attained her twelfth year, presented to her as her husband the
Marquis de Perrant, formerly a lover of the grandmother herself. The
marquis was seventy years of age, having been born in the reign of Henry
IV; he had seen the court of Louis XIII and that of Louis XIV's youth,
and he had remained one of its most elegant and favoured nobles; he had
the manners of those two periods, the politest that the world has known,
so that the young girl, not knowing as yet the meaning of marriage and