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Updated: June 19, 2025
The old people at Beaubocage survived the seigneur and chatelaine of Cotenoir by some years, and survived also the fiery lieutenant, who fell in Algeria without having attained his captaincy, or added any military renown to the good old name of de Nerague in his own magnificent person. Francois saw his grandson established at Cotenoir before he died.
"My father would have sold me as negro slaves are sold labas," he said, on those rare occasions when he opened his old wounds, which were to the last unhealed: "I am glad that I escaped the contemptible barter." He was in very truth glad. Poverty and hardship seemed to him easier to bear than the dreary prosperity of Cotenoir and a wife he could not have loved.
He rose unrefreshed, feverish, forgetful of Cotenoir and Madelon Frehlter, as if that place and that person had never emerged from the shapeless substances of chaos. He wanted to see her again, to console her, if that were possible. Oh, that it might be his privilege to console her!
"Thou art like my eldest, my cousin," he said; "Diana saw the likeness at the Sacre Coeur when she beheld my daughter; and I too saw my eldest's look in thine eyes when I first met thee. Remember, it was convened between us that Cotenoir should be a home for thee and for Hawkehurst before I knew what link bound thee to the house of Lenoble. Now thou and thy husband will be of our family."
You will transform the old chateau of Cotenoir into a pleasant home? You will cease to live amongst strangers? You will come to those who will love and cherish you as their own, their dearest and best and brightest? You will give your poor old father a corner by your fireside? He is old and needs a home for his last years. For his sake, Diane, for mine, for my children, let your answer be yes!
Mademoiselle Madelon was looking forward to her fourteenth anniversary, and she, too, was a very pretty pianist, and altogether a young prodigy of learning and goodness, as the nuns told the master of Cotenoir.
One forgives anything in old age. In this, at least, it is a second childhood; and my father is very old, Lotta. I saw the look of age in his face more plainly at Cotenoir, where he assumed his usual debonnaire man-of-the-world tone and manner, than I had seen it in London, when he was a professed invalid. He is much changed since I was with him at Foretdechene.
That was a question which also presented itself to the mind of M. Gustave Lenoble, of Beaubocage in esse, and Cotenoir in posse. Madame Meynell rarely appeared at the common breakfast in the grim dining-room of the Pension Magnotte. Gustave was therefore in nowise surprised to miss her on this particular morning. He took a cup of coffee, and hurried off to his daily duties.
A little more than a year after this, and the yellow corn was waving on the fertile plains of Normandy, fruit ripening in orchards on hillside and in valley; merry holiday folks splashing and dabbling in the waves that wash the yellow sands of Dieppe; horses coming to grief in Norman steeplechases; desperate gamesters losing their francs and half-francs in all kinds of frivolous games in the Dieppe etablissement; and yonder, in the heart of Normandy, beyond the tall steeples of Rouen, a happy family assembled at the Chateau Cotenoir.
"He could not but be charmed," repeated the old man, with feeble gallantry. He was thinking of the joining together of Beaubocage and Cotenoir; and it seemed a very small thing to him that such a union of estates would involve the joining of a man and woman, who were to hold to each other and love each other until death should part them.
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