Buxieres, whose recent decease had brought about the visit of
the Justice of Auberive and his clerk.

Claude de Buxieres had lived all his life at Vivey. Inheriting from his
father and grandfather flourishing health and a robust constitution, he
had also from them strong love for his native territory, a passion for
the chase, and a horror of the constraint and decorum exacted by worldly
obligations. He was a spoiled child, brought up by a weak-minded mother
and a preceptor without authority, who had succeeded in imparting to him
only the most elementary amount of instruction, and he had, from a very
early age, taken his own pleasure as his sole rule of life. He lived
side by side with peasants and poachers, and had himself become a
regular country yeoman, wearing a blouse, dining at the wine-shop, and
taking more pleasure in speaking the mountain patois than his own native
French. The untimely death of his father, killed by an awkward huntsman
while following the hounds, had emancipated him at the age of twenty
years. From this period he lived his life freely, as he understood it;
always in the open air, without hindrance of any sort, and entirely
unrestrained.

Nothing was exaggerated in the stories told concerning him. He was a
handsome fellow, jovial and dashing in his ways, and lavish with his
money, so he met with few rebuffs. Married women, maids, widows, any
peasant girl of attractive form or feature, all had had to resist his
advances, and with more than one the resistance had been very slight. It
was no false report which affirmed that he had peopled the district
with his illegitimate progeny. He was not hard to please, either;
strawberry-pickers, shepherd-girls, wood-pilers, day-workers, all were
equally charming in his sight; he sought only youth, health, and a
kindly disposition.

Marriage would have been the only safeguard for him; but aside from the
fact that his reputation of reckless huntsman and general scapegrace
naturally kept aloof the daughters of the nobles, and even the Langarian
middle classes, he dreaded more than anything else in the world the
monotonous regularity of conjugal life. He did not care to be restricted
always to the same dishes--preferring, as he said, his meat sometimes
roast, sometimes boiled, or even fried, according to his humor and his
appetite.

Nevertheless, about the time that Claude de Buxieres attained his
thirty-sixth year, it was noticed that he had a more settled a