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Updated: June 19, 2025
At Cotenoir, when you are out, there is no one to talk to; and we have no little parties, no excursions into the country, none of those pleasures which the other girls tell us they have during the holidays." This was the gist of the lamentations of Mademoiselles Clarice and Madelon; and the father knew not how to supply the mysterious something which was wanting to make Cotenoir a pleasant home.
Poor Cydalise had never seen a finer mansion than the old chateau, with its sugar-loaf towers and stone terraces, and winding stairs, and tiny inconvenient turret chambers, and long dreary salon and salle-a-manger. She could picture to herself nothing more splendid. For Gustave to be offered the future possession of Cotenoir was as if he were suddenly to be offered the succession to a kingdom.
"But the two estates! together they would make you a great proprietor. You would not surely refuse such fortune?" Cydalise gave a little scream of horror. "Cotenoir! to refuse Cotenoir! Ah, surely that would be impossible! But figure to yourself, then, Gustave " "Nay, Cydalise, you forget the young lady goes with the chateau; a fixture that we cannot dispense with."
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.
When they were gone, the mother and sister sat by one of the open windows, waiting for them. Without all was still. Distant lights glimmered through the summer twilight, the lighted windows of Cotenoir. "How pleased Madelon will be," said Cydalise, looking towards those glimmering windows.
The servants at Cotenoir had gone their own ways with but little interference since the death of Madame de Nerague, which occurred two years before that of her daughter, Clarice Lenoble.
She could not bring herself to consider that Madelon was neither agreeable nor attractive, and that, after all, the wife must count for something in every marriage contract. She could see nothing, she could think of nothing, but Cotenoir. The glory and grandeur of that estate absorbed every other consideration. No one of those three conspirators feared any opposition on the part of their victim.
I need scarcely tell you that his first idea of your excellence was inspired by those glowing descriptions of your goodness, your beauty, your heroism, which I favoured him with, en passant, during our conversations at Cotenoir, where the happy accident of a business transaction first introduced me to him.
He sent polite messages to the demoiselle Frehlter in his letters to Cydalise; and he received from Cydalise much information, more graphic than interesting, upon the subject of the family at Cotenoir; and so his days went on with pleasant monotony. This was the brief summer of his youth; but, alas, how near at hand was the dark and dismal winter that was to freeze this honest joyous heart!
She would accept his offer; her father would rejoice in so fortunate an alliance; her friends of Bayswater would felicitate a change so desirable. And when he returned to Normandy he would take her with him, and say to his children, "Behold your mother!" And then the great rambling mansion of Cotenoir would assume a home-like aspect.
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