For with a little capital, Monsieur le Marquis, your rent-roll might be very greatly increased, the forests and orchards improved, those meadows round S_____ drained and irrigated.
Agriculture is beginning to be understood in Bretagne, and your estate would soon double its value in the hands of a spirited capitalist.

My advice to you, therefore, is to go to Paris, employ a good 'avoue,' practised in such branch of his profession, to negotiate the consolidation of your mortgages upon terms that will enable you to sell outlying portions, and so pay off the charge by instalments agreed upon; to see if some safe company or rich individual can be found to undertake for a term of years the management of your forests, the draining of the S_____ meadows, the superintendence of your fisheries, etc.

They, it is true, will monopolize the profits for many years,--perhaps twenty; but you are a young man: at the end of that time you will reenter on your estate with a rental so improved that the mortgages, now so awful, will seem to you comparatively trivial." In pursuance of this advice, the young Marquis had come to Paris fortified with a letter from M.Hebert to an 'avoue' of eminence, and with many letters from his aunt to the nobles of the Faubourg connected with his house.

Now one reason why M.Hebert had urged his client to undertake this important business in person, rather than volunteer his own services in Paris, was somewhat extra-professional.

He had a sincere and profound affection for Alain; he felt compassion for that young life so barrenly wasted in seclusion and severe privations; he respected, but was too practical a man of business to share, those chivalrous sentiments of loyalty to an exiled dynasty which disqualified the man for the age he lived in, and, if not greatly modified, would cut him off from the hopes and aspirations of his eager generation.