Paris. This fair wanderer succeeded in chaining to herself the heart and
the steps of the Marquis de Rochebriant.

She was very rich; she lived semi-royally. Hers was just the house in
which it suited the Marquis to be the 'enfant qate.' I suspect that,
cat-like, his attachment was rather to the house than to the person of
his mistress. Not that he was domiciled with the Princess; that would
have been somewhat too much against the proprieties, greatly too much
against the Marquis's notions of his own dignity. He had his own
carriage, his own apartments, his own suite, as became so grand a
seigneur and the lover of so grand a dame. His estates, mortgaged before
he came to them, yielded no income sufficient for his wants; he mortgaged
deeper and deeper, year after year, till he could mortgage them no more.
He sold his hotel at Paris; he accepted without scruple his sister's
fortune; he borrowed with equal 'sang froid' the two hundred thousand
francs which his son on coming of age inherited from his mother.
Alain yielded that fortune to him without a murmur,--nay, with pride;
he thought it destined to go towards raising a regiment for the
fleur-de-lis.

To do the Marquis justice, he was fully persuaded that he should shortly
restore to his sister and son what he so recklessly took from them. He
was engaged to be married to his Princess so soon as her own husband
died. She had been separated from the Prince for many years, and every
year it was said he could not last a year longer. But he completed the
measure of his conjugal iniquities by continuing to live; and one day,
by mistake, Death robbed the lady of the Marquis instead of the Prince.

This was an accident which the Marquis had never counted upon. He was
still young enough to consider himself young; in fact, one principal