For a long time M.d'Escorval had seen the prodigious edifice erected by the genius whom he had made his idol totter as if about to fall.
Certainly, he felt intense chagrin at this fall, but he was heart-broken at the sight of all the treason and cowardice which followed it.

He was indignant and horrified at the rising _en masse_ of the avaricious, who hastened to gorge themselves with the spoil.
Under these circumstances, exile from Paris seemed an actual blessing.
"Besides," as he remarked to the baroness, "we shall soon be forgotten here." But even while he said this he felt many misgivings.

Still, by his side, his noble wife presented a tranquil face, even while she trembled for the safety of her adored husband.
On this first Sunday in August, M.d'Escorval and his wife had been unusually sad.

A vague presentiment of approaching misfortune weighed heavily upon their hearts.
At the same hour that Lacheneur presented himself at the house of the Abbe Midon, they were seated upon the terrace in front of the house, gazing anxiously at the two roads leading from Escorval to the chateau, and to the village of Sairmeuse.
Warned, that same morning, by his friends in Montaignac of the arrival of the duke, the baron had sent his son to inform M.Lacheneur.
He had requested him to be absent as short a time as possible; but in spite of this fact, the hours were rolling by, and Maurice had not returned.
"What if something has happened to him!" both father and mother were thinking.
No; nothing had happened to him.

Only a word from Mlle.