uire courage
from routine. The old gentleman, who had come to Paris from Touraine
to satisfy his curiosity about Madame Firmiani, and found it not at all
assuaged by the Parisian gossip which he heard, was a man of honor and
breeding. His sole heir was a nephew, whom he greatly loved, in whose
interests he planted his poplars. When a man thinks without annoyance
about his heir, and watches the trees grow daily finer for his future
benefit, affection grows too with every blow of the spade around her
roots. Though this phenomenal feeling is not common, it is still to be
met with in Touraine.

This cherished nephew, named Octave de Camps, was a descendant of
the famous Abbe de Camps, so well known to bibliophiles and learned
men,--who, by the bye, are not at all the same thing. People in
the provinces have the bad habit of branding with a sort of decent
reprobation any young man who sells his inherited estates. This
antiquated prejudice has interfered very much with the stock-jobbing
which the present government encourages for its own interests. Without
consulting his uncle, Octave had lately sold an estate belonging to him
to the Black Band.[*] The chateau de Villaines would have been pulled
down were it not for the remonstrances which the old uncle made to the
representatives of the "Pickaxe company." To increase the old man's
wrath, a distant relative (one of those cousins of small means and
much astuteness about whom shrewd provincials are wont to remark, "No
lawsuits for me with him!") had, as it were by accident, come to visit
Monsieur de Bourbonne, and _incidentally_ informed him of his nephew's
ruin. Monsieur Octave de Camps, he said, having wasted his means on a
certain Madame Firmiani, was now reduced to teaching mathematics for a
living, while awaiting his uncle's death, not daring to let him know of
his dissipations. This distant cousin, a sort of Charles Moor, was not
ashamed to give this fatal news to the old gentleman as he sat by his
fire, digesting a profuse provincial dinner.

[*] The "Bande Noire" was a mysterious association of
speculators, whose object was to buy in landed estates, cut
them up, and sell them off in small parcels to the
peasantry, or others.

But heirs cannot always rid themselves of uncles as easily as they
would like to. Thanks to his obstinacy, this particular uncle refused
to believe the story, and came out victorious from the attack of
indigestion produced b