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Presently Calyste saw, coming toward him, the Chevalier du Halga and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel, who were walking together on the mall. He heard them say his name, and he slipped aside out of sight, but not out of hearing. The chevalier and the old maid, believing themselves alone, were talking aloud. "If Charlotte de Kergarouet comes," said the chevalier, "keep her four or five months.
"When a man is named Savinien de Portenduere," cried Rastignac, "and has a future peer of France for a cousin and Admiral Kergarouet for a great-uncle, and commits the enormous blunder of allowing himself to be put in Sainte-Pelagie, it is very certain that he must not stay there, my good fellow." "Why didn't you tell me?" cried de Marsay.
"What does Madame Schinner say to all this?" pursued the count; "for I believe you married, out of love, the beautiful Adelaide de Rouville, the protegee of old Admiral de Kergarouet; who, by the bye, obtained for you the order for the Louvre ceilings through his nephew, the Comte de Fontaine." "A great painter is never married when he travels," said Mistigris.
"Madame de Portenduere, who was a Kergarouet, would never consent, even if she had to live on three hundred francs a year, to the marriage of her son, the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduere, with whom? with Ursula Mirouet, daughter of a bandsman in a regiment, without money, and whose father alas! I must now tell you all was the bastard son of an organist, my father-in-law."
You know, don't you, that the battle of the 'Belle-Poule' was so famous that women wore head-dresses 'a la Belle-Poule. Madame de Kergarouet was the first to come to the opera in that head-dress, and I said to her: 'Madame, you are dressed for conquest. The speech was repeated from box to box all through the house."
Her younger sister had married a Kergarouet, who, in spite of the deep disapproval of the whole region, added the name of Pen-Hoel to his own and called himself the Vicomte de Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel. "Heaven has punished him," said the old lady; "he has nothing but daughters, and the Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel name will be wiped out."
Savinien's great-uncle was therefore the Vice-admiral de Kergarouet, and his cousin was the Comte de Portenduere, grandson of the admiral, both of them very rich. The Vice-admiral de Kergarouet lived in Paris and the Comte de Portenduere at the chateau of that name in Dauphine. The count represented the elder branch, and Savinien was the only scion of the younger.
Toward the last, the curate of Pen-Hoel made certain representations to old Madame Lorrain, begging her to persuade her daughter-in-law to marry Brigaut, and promising to have the major appointed justice of peace for the canton of Pen-Hoel, through the influence of the Vicomte de Kergarouet. The death of the poor young woman put an end to the matter.
Though the old sailor had often said that he knew his longitude and latitude too well to allow himself to be captured by a young corvette, one fine morning Paris drawing-rooms heard the news of the marriage of Mademoiselle de Fontaine to the Comte de Kergarouet.
"Well, uncle," Monsieur de Fontaine went on, "how could you hide from us all you knew about this young man? You must have seen how anxious we have been. Is Monsieur de Longueville a man of family?" "I don't know him from Adam or Eve," said the Comte de Kergarouet. "Trusting to that crazy child's tact, I got him here by a method of my own.
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