him
in charge of his private affairs, and appointed him one of his cabinet
ministers. On the 20th of March, Monsieur de Serizy did not go to Ghent.
He informed Napoleon that he remained faithful to the house of Bourbon;
would not accept his peerage during the Hundred Days, and passed that
period on his estate at Serizy.

After the second fall of the Emperor, he became once more a
privy-councillor, was appointed vice-president of the Council of State,
and liquidator, on behalf of France, of claims and indemnities demanded
by foreign powers. Without personal assumption, without ambition even,
he possessed great influence in public affairs. Nothing of importance
was done without consulting him; but he never went to court, and was
seldom seen in his own salons. This noble life, devoting itself from its
very beginning to work, had ended by becoming a life of incessant toil.
The count rose at all seasons by four o'clock in the morning, and
worked till mid-day, attended to his functions as peer of France and
vice-president of the Council of State in the afternoons, and went to
bed at nine o'clock. In recognition of such labor, the King had made
him a knight of his various Orders. Monsieur de Serizy had long worn the
grand cross of the Legion of honor; he also had the orders of the Golden
Fleece, of Saint-Andrew of Russia, that of the Prussian Eagle, and
nearly all the lesser Orders of the courts of Europe. No man was less
obvious, or more useful in the political world than he. It is easy
to understand that the world's honor, the fuss and feathers of public
favor, the glories of success were indifferent to a man of this stamp;
but no one, unless a priest, ever comes to life of this kind without
some serious underlying reason. His conduct had its cause, and a cruel
one.

In love with his wife before he married her, this passion had lasted
through all the secret unhappiness of his marriage with a widow,--a
woman mistress of herself before as well as after her second marriage,
and who used her liberty all the more freely because her husband treated
her with the indulgence of a mother for a spoilt child. His constant
toil served him as shield and buckler against pangs of heart which he
silenced with the care that diplomatists give to the keeping of secrets.
He knew, moreover, how ridiculous was jealousy in the eyes of a society
that would never have believed in the conjugal passion of an old
statesman. How happened it that from