The Collection of Antiquities | Page 6

the Sieur du Crosier; and though
there was little rancor in his composition, he set others against the
sometime forage-contractor. Du Croisier, on the other hand, was a man
to bear a grudge and nurse a vengeance for a score of years. He hated
Chesnel and the d'Esgrignon family with the smothered, all-absorbing
hate only to be found in a country town. His rebuff had simply ruined
him with the malicious provincials among whom he had come to live,
thinking to rule over them. It was so real a disaster that he was not long
in feeling the consequences of it. He betook himself in desperation to a
wealthy old maid, and met with a second refusal. Thus failed the
ambitious schemes with which he had started. He had lost his hope of a
marriage with Mlle. d'Esgrignon, which would have opened the
Faubourg Saint-Germain of the province to him; and after the second
rejection, his credit fell away to such an extent that it was almost as
much as he could do to keep his position in the second rank.
In 1805, M. de la Roche-Guyon, the oldest son of an ancient family
which had previously intermarried with the d'Esgrignons, made
proposals in form through Maitre Chesnel for Mlle. Marie Armande
Clair d'Esgrignon. She declined to hear the notary.
"You must have guessed before now that I am a mother, dear Chesnel,"
she said; she had just put her nephew, a fine little boy of five, to bed.
The old Marquis rose and went up to his sister, but just returned from
the cradle; he kissed her hand reverently, and as he sat down again,
found words to say:
"My sister, you are a d'Esgrignon."
A quiver ran through the noble girl; the tears stood in her eyes. M.
d'Esgrignon, the father of the present Marquis, had married a second
wife, the daughter of a farmer of taxes ennobled by Louis XIV. It was a
shocking mesalliance in the eyes of his family, but fortunately of no
importance, since a daughter was the one child of the marriage.

Armande knew this. Kind as her brother had always been, he looked on
her as a stranger in blood. And this speech of his had just recognized
her as one of the family.
And was not her answer the worthy crown of eleven years of her noble
life? Her every action since she came of age had borne the stamp of the
purest devotion; love for her brother was a sort of religion with her.
"I shall die Mlle. d'Esgrignon," she said simply, turning to the notary.
"For you there could be no fairer title," returned Chesnel, meaning to
convey a compliment. Poor Mlle. d'Esgrignon reddened.
"You have blundered, Chesnel," said the Marquis, flattered by the
steward's words, but vexed that his sister had been hurt. "A d'Esgrignon
may marry a Montmorency; their descent is not so pure as ours. The
d'Esgrignons bear or, two bends, gules," he continued, "and nothing
during nine hundred years has changed their scutcheon; as it was at first,
so it is to-day. Hence our device, Cil est nostre, taken at a tournament
in the reign of Philip Augustus, with the supporters, a knight in armor
or on the right, and a lion gules on the left."

"I do not remember that any woman I have ever met has struck my
imagination as Mlle. d'Esgrignon did," said Emile Blondet, to whom
contemporary literature is indebted for this history among other things.
"Truth to tell, I was a boy, a mere child at the time, and perhaps my
memory-pictures of her owe something of their vivid color to a boy's
natural turn for the marvelous.
"If I was playing with other children on the Parade, and she came to
walk there with her nephew Victurnien, the sight of her in the distance
thrilled me with very much the effect of galvanism on a dead body.
Child as I was, I felt as though new life had been given me.
"Mlle. Armande had hair of tawny gold; there was a delicate fine down
on her cheek, with a silver gleam upon it which I loved to catch, putting
myself so that I could see the outlines of her face lit up by the daylight,
and feel the fascination of those dreamy emerald eyes, which sent a
flash of fire through me whenever they fell upon my face. I used to
pretend to roll on the grass before her in our games, only to try to reach
her little feet, and admire them on a closer view. The soft whiteness of
her skin, her delicate features, the clearly cut lines of her forehead, the
grace of her slender figure, took me with a sense of surprise, while as

yet I