pretty estate in the suburbs of Paris, live there and plant cabbages. Why
work? they had no children.

Michel agreed to these schemes. For a long time he had wished for repose.
Often he had feared that his wife's ambition would lead them too far. But
now, since she stopped of her own accord, it was all for the best.

At this juncture their solicitor informed them that, near to their works,
the Cernay estate was to be put up for sale. Very often, when going from
Jouy to the mills, Madame Desvarennes had noticed the chateau, the slate
roofs of the turrets of which rose gracefully from a mass of deep
verdure. The Count de Cernay, the last representative of a noble race,
had just died of consumption, brought on by reckless living, leaving
nothing behind him but debts and a little girl two years old. Her mother,
an Italian singer and his mistress, had left him one morning without
troubling herself about the child. Everything was to be sold, by order of
the Court.

Some most lamentable incidents had saddened the Count's last hours. The
bailiffs had entered the house with the doctor when he came to pay his
last call, and the notices of the sale were all but posted up before the
funeral was over. Jeanne, the orphan, scared amid the troubles of this
wretched end, seeing unknown men walking into the reception-rooms with
their hats on, hearing strangers speaking loudly and with arrogance, had
taken refuge in the laundry. It was there that Madame Desvarennes found
her, playing, plainly dressed in a little alpaca frock, her pretty hair
loose and falling on her shoulders. She looked astonished at what she had
seen; silent, not daring to run or sing as formerly in the great desolate
house whence the master had just been taken away forever.