French families.

There was more truth in the statement that Mme. Derues was an heiress. A
kinsman of her mother, Beraud by name, had become the heir to a certain
Marquis Desprez. Beraud was the son of a small merchant. His mother
had married a second time, the husband being the Marquis Desprez, and
through her Beraud had inherited the Marquis' property. According to the
custom of the time, Beraud, on coming into his inheritance, took a
title from one of his estates and called himself thenceforth the lord of
Despeignes-Duplessis. A rude, solitary, brutal man, devoted to sport,
he lived alone in his castle of Candeville, hated by his neighbours, a
terror to poachers. One day he was found lying dead in his bedroom; he
had been shot in the chest; the assassin had escaped through an open
window.

The mystery of Beraud's murder was never solved. His estate of 200,000
livres was divided among three cousins, of whom the mother of Mme.
Derues was one. Mme. Derues herself was entitled to a third of his
mother's share of the estate, that is, one-ninth of the whole. But in
1775 Derues acquired the rest of the mother's share on condition that
he paid her an annual income of 1,200 livres. Thus on the liquidation
of the Duplessis inheritance Mme. Derues would be entitled nominally to
some 66,500 livres, about L11,000 in English money. But five years had
passed since the death of Despeignes-Duplessis, and the estate was still
in the slow process of legal settlement. If Derues were to receive the
full third of the Duplessis inheritance--a very unlikely supposition
after four years of liquidation--66,000 livres would not suffice to pay
his ordinary debts quite apart from the purchase money of Buisson-Souef.
His financial condition was in the last degree critical. Not content
with the modest calling of a grocer, Derues had turned money-lender,
a money-lender to spendthrift and embarrassed noblemen. Derues dearly
loved a lord; he wanted to become one himself; it delighted him to
receive dukes and marquises at the Rue Beaubourg, even if they came
there with the avowed object of raising the wind. The smiling grocer, in
his everlasting bonnet and flowered dressing-gown a la J. J. Rousseau,
was ever ready to oblige the needy scion of a noble house. What he
borrowed at moderate interest from his creditors he lent at enhanced
interest to the quality. Duns and bailiffs jostled the dukes and
marquises whose presence at the Rue Beaubourg so impr