CHAPTER III.
Few of the inhabitants of Sairmeuse knew, except by name, the terrible duke whose arrival had thrown the whole village into commotion.
Some of the oldest residents had a faint recollection of having seen him long ago, before '89 indeed, when he came to visit his aunt, Mlle.
Armande.
His duties, then, had seldom permitted him to leave the court.
If he had given no sign of life during the empire, it was because he had not been compelled to submit to the humiliations and suffering which so many of the emigrants were obliged to endure in their exile.
On the contrary, he had received, in exchange for the wealth of which he had been deprived by the revolution, a princely fortune.
Taking refuge in London after the defeat of the army of Conde, he had been so fortunate as to please the only daughter of Lord Holland, one of the richest peers in England, and he had married her.
She possessed a fortune of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling, more than six million francs.
Still the marriage was not a happy one.

The chosen companion of the dissipated and licentious Count d'Artois was not likely to prove a very good husband.
The young duchess was contemplating a separation when she died, in giving birth to a boy, who was baptized under the names of Anne-Marie-Martial.
The loss of his wife did not render the Duc de Sairmeuse inconsolable.
He was free and richer than he had ever been.
As soon as _les convenances_ permitted, he confided his son to the care of a relative of his wife, and began his roving life again.
Rumor had told the truth.

He had fought, and that furiously, against France in the Austrian, and then in the Russian ranks.
And he took no pains to conceal the fact; convinced that he had only performed his duty.

He considered that he had honestly and loyally gained the rank of general which the Emperor of all the Russias had bestowed upon him.
He had not returned to France during the first Restoration; but his absence had been involuntary.

His father-in-law, Lord Holland, had just died, and the duke was detained in London by business connected with his son's immense inheritance.
Then followed the "Hundred Days." They exasperated him.
But "the good cause," as he styled it, having triumphed anew, he hastened to France.
Alas! Lacheneur judged the character of his former master correctly, when he resisted the entreaties of his daughter.
This man, who had been compelled to conceal himself during the first Restoration, knew only too well, that the returned _emigres_ had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
The Duc de Sairmeuse was no exception to the rule.
He thought, and nothing could be more sadly absurd, that a mere act of authority would suffice to suppress forever all the events of the Revolution and of the empire.
When he said: "I do not admit that!" he firmly believed that there was nothing more to be said; that controversy was ended; and that what _had_ been was as if it had never been.
If some, who had seen Louis XVII.