ck seven centuries for proof?

Yet here he was being introduced to the revolutionary general as "my
kinsman of the isles of Normandy." Here, too, was the same General
Grandjon-Larisse applauding him on his rare fortune to be thus released
on parole through the Duc de Bercy, and quoting with a laugh, half sneer
and half raillery, the old Norman proverb: "A Norman dead a thousand
years cries Haro! Haro! if you tread on his grave."

So saying, he saluted the Duke with a liberal flourish of the hand and a
friendly bow, and turned away to Dalbarade.

A half-hour later Philip was outside with the Duke, walking slowly
through the court-yard to an open gateway, where waited a carriage with
unliveried coachman and outriders. No word was spoken till they entered
the carriage and were driven swiftly away.

"Whither now, your Highness?" asked Philip.

"To the duchy," answered the other shortly, and relapsed into sombre
meditation.

CHAPTER XX

The castle of the Prince d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy, was set upon a vast
rock, and the town of Bercy huddled round the foot of it and on great
granite ledges some distance up. With fifty defenders the castle, on its
lofty pedestal, might have resisted as many thousands; and, indeed,
it had done so more times than there were rubies in the rings of
the present Duke, who had rescued Captain Philip d'Avranche from the
clutches of the Red Government.

Upon the castle, with the flag of the duchy, waved the republican
tricolour, where for a thousand years had floated a royal banner. When
France's great trouble came to her, and the nobles fled, or went
to fight for the King in the Vendee, the old Duke, with a dreamy
indifference to the opinion of Europe, had proclaimed alliance with the
new Government. He felt himself privileged in being thus selfish; and he
had made the alliance that he might pursue, unchecked, the one remaining
object of his life.

This object had now grown from a habit into a passion. It was now his
one ambition to arrange a new succession excluding the Vaufontaines,
a detested branch of the Bercy family. There had been an ancient feud
between his family and the Vaufontaines, whose rights to the succession,
after his eldest son, were to this time paramount. For three years past
he had had a whole monastery of Benedictine monks at work to find some
collateral branch from which he might take a successor to Leopold John,
his imbecile heir--but to no purpose.

In more