Charlottes Inheritance | Page 2

not content
with her viands, they might go and find more agreeable viands
elsewhere.
Madame Magnotte was altogether mysterious and inscrutable. Some
people said that she was a countess, and that the wealth and lands of her
family had been confiscated by the committee of public unsafety in '93.
Others declared that she had been a popular actress in a small theatre in
the days of Napoleon. She was tall and thin--nay, of an exceptional
leanness--and her complexion was of a more agreeable yellow than the
butter that appeared on her hospitable board; but she had flashing black
eyes, and a certain stateliness of gait and grandeur of manner that
impressed those young Bohemians, her boarders, with a kind of awe.
They talked of her as the "countess," and by that name she was known
to all inmates of the mansion; but in all their dealings with her they
treated her with unfailing respect.
One of the quietest among the young men who enjoyed the privileges
of Madame Magnotte's abode was a certain Gustave Lenoble, a
law-student, the only son of a very excellent couple who lived on their
own estate, near an obscure village in Normandy. The estate was of the
smallest; a dilapidated old house, known in the immediate
neighbourhood as "the Château," and very dear to those who resided
therein; a garden, in which everything seemed to have run to seed; and
about forty acres of the poorest land in Normandy. These possessions
constituted the patrimonial estate of Francois Lenoble, propriétaire, of
Beaubocage, near Vevinordin, the department of Eure.
The people amongst whom the good man lived his simple life called
him M. Lenoble de Beaubocage, but he did not insist upon this
distinction; and on sending out his only son to begin the battle of life in
the great world of Paris, he recommended the young man to call
himself Lenoble, tout court.
The young man had never cherished any other design. He was of all

creatures the least presuming or pretentious. The father was Legitimist
to the very marrow; the son half Buonapartist, half republican. The
father and son had quarrelled about these differences of opinion
sometimes in a pleasantly disputatious manner; but no political
disagreement could lesser the love between these two. Gustave loved
his parents as only a Frenchman can venture to love his father and
mother--with a devotion for the gentleman that bordered on enthusiasm,
with a fond reverence for the lady that was the very essence of chivalry.
There was a sister, who regarded her brother Gustave as the
embodiment of all that is perfect in youthful mankind; and there were a
couple of old house-servants, a very stupid clumsy lad in the stables,
and half a dozen old mongrel dogs, born and bred on the premises, who
seemed to share the young lady's opinions. There was not a little
discussion upon the subject of Gustave Lenoble's future career; and it
was not without difficulty that the father could be persuaded to approve
the choice of a profession which the young man had made. The
seigneur of Beaubocage cherished an exaggerated pride of race little
suspected by those who saw his simple life, and were pleased by his
kindly unaffected manners. The house of Lenoble, at some remote and
almost mythical period of history, had distinguished itself in divers
ways; and those bygone grandeurs, vague and shadowy in the minds of
all others, seemed very real to Monsieur Lenoble. He assured his son
that no Lenoble had ever been a lawyer. They had been always lords of
the soil, living on their own lands, which had once stretched wide and
far in that Norman province; a fact proved by certain maps in M.
Lenoble's possession, the paper whereof was worn and yellow with age.
They had stooped to no profession save that of arms. One seigneur of
Beaubocage had fought under Bayard himself; another had fallen at
Pavia, on that great day when all was lost hormis l'honneur; another
had followed the white plume of the Bernais; another--but was there
any need to tell of the glories of that house upon which Gustave was so
eager to inflict the disgrace of a learned profession?
Thus argued the father; but the mother had spent her girlhood amidst
the clamour of the Buonapartist campaigns, and the thought of war was
very terrible to her. The memory of the retreat from Russia was not yet
twenty years old. There were men alive to tell the story, to depict those

days and nights of horror, that mighty march of death. It was she and
her daughter Cydalise who had helped to persuade Gustave that he was
born to distinguish himself in the law. They wanted him to study in
Paris--the young man himself had a wild desire