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Updated: June 8, 2025
He talked of Normandy, his daughters and their convent, his little son at Rouen, his aunt Cydalise, the quiet old lady at Beaubocage; his grandfather, his grandmother, the old servants, and everything familiar and dear to him. He told of his family history with boyish candour, untainted by egotism, and seemed much pleased by Diana's apparent interest in his unstudied talk.
He communicated this design to his old crony, Francois Lenoble, one day when the Beaubocage family dined at Chateau Cotenoir. "I think of marrying my daughter," he said to his friend, when the ladies were safely out of hearing at the other end of the long dreary saloon. "Now thy son Gustave is a fine fellow brave, handsome, and of a good race.
Again the seigneur of Beaubocage assured his friend that Gustave would be enchanted with the proposal; and again it was of Cotenoir that he thought, and not of the heart or the inclinations of his son. This conversation took place late in autumn, and at the new year Gustave was to come.
The destined master of Beaubocage and Cotenoir was entirely without ready money. He had his watch. He put his hand upon that clumsy timekeeper as he talked to madame. "Je te porterai chez ma tante, mon gars," he said to himself. But he doubted whether the high priests of the pious mountain the Dordona of Pauperism would advance much upon this antique specimen of the watchmaker's art.
He lived to see the lands of Cotenoir and Beaubocage united in the person of his grandson, who married Clarice, the only surviving child of M. and Madame de Nerague. Two sons and a daughter had been born at Cotenoir; but the sons withered and faded in early boyhood, and even the daughter, though considered a flourishing plant in that poor garden of weakling blossoms, was but a fragile creature.
No one but her mother and this friend, whom she could trust, knew of the business that had brought her from Beaubocage. In seven years the father had never uttered his only son's name; in all the seven years that name had never been spoken in his hearing.
He has proved himself a hard man to me, cruel and obdurate beyond all my fears; but I know he is not altogether heartless. When I am dead, you will take the letter in one hand, the child in the other, and go to Beaubocage. I believe he will adopt the boy, and that the little one will give him the comfort and happiness he hoped from me.
Seven years after that miserable summer night at Beaubocage on which Gustave Lenoble was disowned by his father, a man and woman, with a boy five years of age, were starving in a garret amongst the housetops and chimneys of Rouen. In the busy city these people lived lonely as in a forest, and were securely hidden from the eyes of all who had ever known them.
Ten years passed, and M. Lenoble of Cotenoir was a widower with two fair young daughters at a convent school on the outskirts of Vevinord, and a boisterous son at an academy in Rouen. Gustave had never followed any profession; the lands of Beaubocage secured him a competence, so prudently had the small estate been managed by the kindred who adored him. His marriage had given him fortune.
At the back of it there is an orchard; on one side a farmyard; behind the orchard lie the fields that compose the farm of Beaubocage and the paternal estate of the Lenoble family. All around the country is very flat. The people seem to be kind and simple, and devotedly attached to "Mademoiselle." There is a rustic peacefulness pervading everything which, for me, stands instead of beauty.
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