her great career by marriage with Louis Racine.

On the very day of their marriage Louis Racine had made a painful
discovery. A heritage of his fathers, which had skipped two generations,
suddenly appeared in himself: he was becoming a hunchback.

Terror, despair, gloom, anxiety had settled upon him. Three months later
Madelinette had gone to Paris alone. The Seigneur had invented excuses
for not accompanying her, so she went instead in the care of the Little
Chemist's widow, as of old Louis had promised to follow within another
three months, but had not done so. The surgical operation performed upon
him was unsuccessful; the strange growth increased. Sensitive, fearful,
and morose, he would not go to Europe to be known as the hunchback
husband of Lajeunesse, the great singer. He dreaded the hour when
Madelinette and he should meet again. A thousand times he pictured her
as turning from him in loathing and contempt. He had married her because
he loved her, but he knew well enough that ten thousand other men could
love her just as well, and be something more than a deformed Seigneur of
an obscure manor in Quebec.

As his gloomy imagination pictured the future, when Madelinette should
return and see him as he was and cease to love him--to build up his
Seigneurial honour to an undue importance, to give his position a
fictitious splendour, became a mania with him. No ruler of a
Grand Duchy ever cherished his honour dearer or exacted homage more
persistently than did Louis Racine in the Seigneury of Pontiac.
Coincident with the increase of these futile extravagances was the
increase of his fanatical patriotism, which at last found vent in
seditious writings, agitations, the purchase of rifles, incitement to
rebellion, and the formation of an armed, liveried troop of dependants at