lle himself is making the chandelier, and has
begun to carve the wood."

"Berquet is to make a cellar under it," said an Abbe.

"No," replied young Monsieur de Soulas, "he is raising the kiosk on a
concrete foundation, that it may not be damp."

"You know the very least things that are done in that house," said
Madame de Chavoncourt sourly, as she looked at one of her great girls
waiting to be married for a year past.

Mademoiselle de Watteville, with a little flush of pride in thinking of
the success of her Belvedere, discerned in herself a vast superiority
over every one about her. No one guessed that a little girl, supposed to
be a witless goose, had simply made up her mind to get a closer view of
the lawyer Savaron's private study.

Albert Savaron's brilliant defence of the Cathedral Chapter was all
the sooner forgotten because the envy of the other lawyers was aroused.
Also, Savaron, faithful to his seclusion, went nowhere. Having no
friends to cry him up, and seeing no one, he increased the chances of
being forgotten which are common to strangers in Besancon. Nevertheless,
he pleaded three times at the Commercial Tribunal in three knotty cases
which had to be carried to the superior Court. He thus gained as clients
four of the chief merchants of the place, who discerned in him so much
good sense and sound legal purview that they placed their claims in his
hands.

On the day when the Watteville family inaugurated the Belvedere, Savaron
also was founding a monument. Thanks to the connections he had obscurely
formed among the upper class of merchants in Besancon, he was starting
a fortnightly paper, called the _Eastern Review_, with the help of forty
shares of five hundred francs each, taken up by his first ten clients,
on whom he had impressed the necessity for promoting the interests of
Besancon, the town where the traffic should meet between Mulhouse and
Lyons, and the chief centre between Mulhouse and Rhone.

To compete with Strasbourg, was it not needful that Besancon should
become a focus of enlightenment as well as of trade? The leading
questions relating to the interests of Eastern France could only be
dealt with in a review. What a glorious task to rob Strasbourg and Dijon
of their literary importance, to bring light to the East of France, and
compete with the centralizing influence of Paris! These reflections, put
forward by Albert, were repeated by the ten merchants, who believed them
to be their o