Honore de Balzac by An Historical Mystery_The Gondreville Mystery

position to defend the interests of his
ward. He had two sons in the army of the princes, and every day, at the
slightest unusual sound, he believed that the municipals of Arcis were
coming to arrest him. Laurence, proud of having sustained a siege and of
possessing the historic whiteness of her swan-like ancestors, despised
the prudent cowardice of the old man who bent to the storm, and dreamed
only of distinguishing herself. So, she boldly hung the portrait of
Charlotte Corday on the walls of her poor salon at Cinq-Cygne, and
crowned it with oak-leaves. She corresponded by messenger with her
twin cousins, in defiance of the law, which punished the act, when
discovered, with death. The messenger, who risked his life, brought back
the answers. Laurence lived only, after the catastrophes at Troyes,
for the triumph of the royal cause. After soberly judging Monsieur and
Madame d'Hauteserre (who lived with her at the chateau de Cinq-Cygne),
and recognizing their honest, but stolid natures, she put them outside
the lines of her own life. She had, moreover, too good a mind and too
sound a judgment to complain of their natures; always kind, amiable,
and affectionate towards them, she nevertheless told them none of her
secrets. Nothing forms a character so much as the practice of constant
concealment in the bosom of a family.
    After she attained her majority Laurence allowed Monsieur d'Hauteserre
to manage her affairs as in the past. So long as her favorite mare was
well-groomed, her maid Catherine dressed to please her, and Gothard
the little page was suitably clothed, she cared for nothing else. Her
thoughts were aimed too high to come down to occupations and interests
which in other times than these would doubtless have pleased her. Dress
was a small matter to her mind; moreover her cousins were not there to
see her. She wore a dark-green habit when she rode, and a gown of some
common woollen stuff with a cape trimmed with braid when she walked;
in the house she was always seen in a silk wrapper. Gothard, the little
groom, a brave and clever lad of fifteen, attended her wherever she
went, and she was nearly always out of doors, riding or hunting over the
farms of Gondreville, without objection being made by either Michu or
the farmers. She rode admirably well, and her cleverness in hunting was
thought miraculous. In the country she was never called anything but
"Mademoiselle" even during the Revolution.
    Whoever has read the fine romance of "Rob Roy" will remember that
rare woman for whose making Walter Scott's imagination abandoned its
customary coldness,—Diana Vernon. The recollection will serve to make
Laurence understood if, to the noble qualities of the Scottish huntress
you add the restrained exaltation of Charlotte Corday, surpassing,
however, the charming vivacity which rendered Diana so attractive. The
young countess had seen her mother die, the Abbe d'Hauteserre shot down,
the Marquis de Simeuse and his wife executed; her only brother had died
of his wounds; her two cousins serving in Conde's army might be killed
at any moment; and, finally, the fortunes of the Simeuse and the
Cinq-Cygne families had been seized and wasted by the Republic without
being of any benefit to the nation. Her grave demeanor, now lapsing into
apparent stolidity, can be readily understood.
    Monsieur d'Hauteserre proved an upright and most careful guardian. Under
his administration Cinq-Cygne became a sort of farm. The good man, who
was far more of a close manager than a knight of the old nobility, had
turned the park and gardens to profit, and used their two hundred acres
of grass and woodland as pasturage for horses and fuel for the family.
Thanks to his severe economy the countess, on coming of age, had
recovered by his investments in the State funds a competent fortune.
In 1798 she possessed about twenty thousand francs a year from those
sources, on which, in fact, some dividends were still due, and twelve
thousand francs a year from the