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That odour of the barracks which distinguished the sub-lieutenant Paul de Nerague became more odious after his marriage with the virtuous Madelon, when he was established niche, as he himself called it in very comfortable, though somewhat gruesome, apartments at Cotenoir. The virtuous Madelon was too stolid to weep for her husband.
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.
She had recovered her good humour, however, on being wooed by a young subaltern in a cavalry regiment stationed at Vevinord, the offshoot of a grander house than that of Lenoble, and whose good looks and good lineage had ultimately prevailed with the Baron. "That is very brilliant," he said of M. Paul de Nerague, the young lieutenant of light cavalry; "but it is not solid, like Gustave.
Only of late, in his thirty-fourth year, had he come to the knowledge of a feeling deeper than dutiful regard for an invalid wife, or affectionate solicitude for motherless children; only of late had he felt his heart stirred by a more thrilling emotion than that placid resignation to the will of Providence which had distinguished his courtship of Mademoiselle de Nerague.
But even her stolidity was not proof against the fiery influence of jealousy, and, waking and sleeping, her visions were of veiled damsels of Orient assailing the too inflammable heart of Lieutenant de Nerague. The young officer was yet absent at that period in which Cydalise returned from Rouen with her brother's child. It was not till the next day that he saw the child.
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.
Your son is honest, candid a brave heart. It is for that I would have given him Madelon. But it is Providence which disposes of us, as our good father St. Velours tells us often; and one must be content. Young Nerague pleases my daughter, and I must swallow him, though for me he smells too strong of the barracks: ca flaire la caserne, mon ami."
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.
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