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Updated: June 15, 2025
Oh, Norbert, it was but the happiness of our future life that I strove to protect. It was " Her speech failed her, and her eyes dilated with horror, for the door behind Norbert opened, and the Duke de Champdoce entered the room, uttering a string of meaningless words, and laughing with that mirthless laugh which is so sure a sign of idiotcy.
The lawyer started as he caught the strange, meaning smile which accompanied these words. "Great heavens!" said he, "why did you not speak sooner?" Catenac at once divined Mascarin's project, and understood the allusion to the Duke de Champdoce. The Marquis de Croisenois was never punctual.
But she remained faithful to her oath; and had it not been for her terrible propensity for drink, Tantaine would never have succeeded in extracting her secret from her. If, on her recovery from her fit of drunk coma, she recollects what has taken place, she will, if I read her character right, go straight to the Duke de Champdoce and tell him that his secret has passed into better hands."
A violent convulsion shook every limb, then arose a long, deep-drawn sigh, and then silence George de Croisenois was dead. Yes, he was dead, and Norbert de Champdoce stood over him with a wild look of terror in his eyes, and his hair bristling upon his head, as a shudder of horror convulsed his body.
All the time that he was showering thanks upon Norbert for his courtesy he was watching the young man's face carefully. "Evidently," thought the Counsellor to himself, "something unusual has taken place at the Chateau de Champdoce. Was not the opportunity for revenge here?" Long since he had decided that through the son he could strike the father. But he must be cautious.
Besides, the two affairs, that of Madame de Mussidan and the Duke de Champdoce, ran so well together. They were the simultaneous emanations of my brain. I worked them up together, and together they must stand or fall." "Then you are determined to go on?" "Yes; more determined than ever."
When Madame de Mussidan heard that Andre was Norbert's son, she declared that nothing could induce her to give her consent to his marriage with her daughter; but among Mascarin's papers Lecoq had discovered the packet containing the compromising correspondence between the Duke de Champdoce and herself.
"And so," resumed Norbert when alone, "it seems that the Duke de Champdoce did not even take the ordinary precaution of assuring himself that you were in privacy before he spoke as he did, and was so carried away by his fury that he never thought that in casting dishonor upon you, he was heaping infamy on me.
Norbert's anger gradually died away, as he replied in accents of intense bitterness, "I may be a savage, but I am not likely to become a traitor. If I once promised to keep a secret, no measures or tortures would tear it from me. I may fear my father, but I am a Champdoce, and fear no other mortal man. Do you understand me?" "But, Marquis "
The account that the Duke of Champdoce had given of M. de Puymandour's mad longing for rank and title was true, and afforded a melancholy instance of that peculiar kind of foolish vanity. He was a much happier man in his younger days, when he was known simply as Palouzet, which was his father's name, whose only wish for distinction was to be looked upon as an honest man.
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