prevent the provincial circles from being greatly offended; they declared
unanimously that young de Buxieres was a bear, and decided to leave him
alone. The death of his father, which happened just as the youth was
beginning his official cares, put a sudden end to all this constraint.
He took advantage of his season of mourning to resume his old ways; and
returned with a sigh of relief to his solitude, his books, and his
meditations. According to the promise of the Imitation, he found
unspeakable joys in his retirement; he rose at break of day, assisted at
early mass, fulfilled, conscientiously, his administrative duties, took
his hurried meals in a boardinghouse, where he exchanged a few polite
remarks with his fellow inmates, then shut himself up in his room to read
Pascal or Bossuet until eleven o'clock.

He thus attained his twenty-seventh year, and it was into the calm of
this serious, cloister-like life, that the news fell of the death of
Claude de Buxieres and of the unexpected inheritance that had accrued to
him.

After entering into correspondence with the notary, M. Arbillot, and
becoming assured of the reality of his rights and of the necessity of
his presence at Vivey, he had obtained leave of absence from his official
duties, and set out for Haute Marne. On the way, he could not help
marvelling at the providential interposition which would enable him to
leave a career for which he felt he had no vocation, and to pursue his
independent life, according to his own tastes, and secured from any fear
of outside cares. According to the account given by the notary, Claude
de Buxieres's fortune might be valued at two hundred thousand francs, in
furniture and other movables, without reckoning the chateau and the
adjacent woods. This was a much larger sum than had ever been dreamed of
by Julien de Buxieres, whose belongings did not amount in all to three