ve a high idea of
his departed gallantry, but he never so much as alluded to the deeds of
surpassing bravery which had astonished the doughty old admiral, Comte
d'Estaing. Though his manner was that of an invalid, and he walked as if
stepping on eggs and complained about the sharpness of the wind or the
heat of the sun, or the dampness of the misty atmosphere, he exhibited
a set of the whitest teeth in the reddest of gums,--a fact reassuring
as to his maladies, which were, however, rather expensive, consisting
as they did of four daily meals of monastic amplitude. His bodily frame,
like that of the baron, was bony, and indestructibly strong, and covered
with a parchment glued to his bones as the skin of an Arab horse on the
muscles which shine in the sun. His skin retained the tawny color it
received in India, whence, however, he did not bring back either facts
or ideas. He had emigrated with the rest of his friends, lost his
property, and was now ending his days with the cross of Saint-Louis and
a pension of two thousand francs, as the legal reward of his
services, paid from the fund of the Invalides de la Marine. The
slight hypochondria which made him invent his imaginary ills is easily
explained by his actual suffering during the emigration. He served in
the Russian navy until the day when the Emperor Alexander ordered him to
be employed against France; he then resigned and went to live at Odessa,
near the Duc de Richelieu, with whom he returned to France. It was the
duke who obtained for this glorious relic of the old Breton navy the
pension which enabled him to live. On the death of Louis XVIII. he
returned to Guerande, and became, after a while, mayor of the city.

The rector, the chevalier, and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel had regularly
passed their evenings for the last fifteen years at the hotel de Guenic,
where the other noble personages of the neighborhood also came. It
will be readily understood that the du Guenics were at the head of the
faubourg Saint-Germain of the old Breton province, where no member of
the new administration sent down by the government was ever allowed to
penetrate. For the last six years the rector coughed when he came to the
crucial words, _Domine, salvum fac regem_. Politics were still at that
point in Guerande.

IV. A NORMAL EVENING

_Mouche_ is a game played with five cards dealt to each player, and one
turned over. The turned-over card is trumps. At each round the player is
a