trophe.

"You are not very lively this evening," remarked Modeste.

"We are playing," said Gobenheim, sorting his cards.

No matter how interesting this situation may appear, it can be made
still more so by explaining Dumay's position towards Modeste. If the
brevity of this explanation makes it seem rather dry, the reader must
pardon its dryness in view of our desire to get through with these
preliminaries as speedily as possible, and the necessity of relating the
main circumstances which govern all dramas.

CHAPTER III. PRELIMINARIES

Jean Francois Bernard Dumay, born at Vannes, started as a soldier for
the army of Italy in 1799. His father, president of the revolutionary
tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office
that the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a
pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth Thermidor.
On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this catastrophe
occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to Italy at the
age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies were beginning to
yield. On the way he met a young man in the department of Var, who
for reasons analogous to his own was in search of glory, believing a
battle-field less perilous than his own Provence. Charles Mignon, the
last scion of an ancient family, which gave its name to a street in
Paris and to a mansion built by Cardinal Mignon, had a shrewd and
calculating father, whose one idea was to save his feudal estate of La
Bastie in the Comtat from the claws of the Revolution. Like all timid
folk of that day, the Comte de La Bastie, now citizen Mignon, found it
more wholesome to cut off other people's heads than to let his own be
cut off. The sham terrorist disappeared after the 9th Thermidor, and was
then inscribed on the list of emigres. The estate of La Bastie was sold;
the towers and bastions of the old castle were pulled down, and citizen
Mignon was soon after discovered at Orleans and put to death with his
wife and all his children except Charles, whom he had sent to find a
refuge for the family in the Upper Alps.

Horrorstruck at the news, Charles waited for better times in a valley of
Mont Genevra; and there he remained till 1799, subsisting on a few
louis which his father had put into his hand at starting. Finally,
when twenty-three years of age, and without other fortune than his fine
presence and that southern beauty which, when it