season as soon as they had recovered
their liberty. Clotilde only knew Vastville from her husband's
enthusiastic descriptions; she loved it on his representations, and it was
for her, in advance, an enchanted spot. Nevertheless, when the carriage
that brought her from the station entered, at nightfall, among the wooded
hills, in the gloomy avenue that led up to the chateau, she felt an
impression as of cold.

"Mon Dieu! my dear," she said, laughingly, "your chateau is a perfect
castle of Udolpho!"

Lucan excused his chateau as best he could, and protested, moreover, that
he was ready to leave it the very next day, if she were not better pleased
with its appearance after sunrise.

It was not long before she became passionately fond of it. Her happiness,
hitherto so constrained, blossomed freely for the first time in that
solitude, and shed upon it a charming light. She even expressed the wish
of spending the winter and waiting there for Julia, who was to return to
France in the course of the following year. Lucan offered some slight
opposition to that project, which appeared to him rather over-heroic for a
Parisian, but ended by adopting it, too happy himself to harbor the
romance of his love in that romantic spot. He began, however, taxing his
ingenuity to attenuate what there might be too austere in that abode, by
opening relations with some of the neighbors for Clotilde's benefit, and
by procuring her, at intervals, her mother's society. Madame de Pers was
kind enough to lend herself to that combination, although the country was
generally repulsive to her, and Vastville in particular had in her eyes a
sinister character. She pretended that she heard at night noises in the
walls and moans in the woods. She slept with one eye open and two candles
burning. The magnificent cliffs that bordered the coast a short distance
off, and which they tried to make her admire, caused her a painful
sensation.

"Very fine!" she said, "very wild! quite wild! But it makes me sick; I
feel as though I were on top of the towers of Notre Dame! Besides, my
children, love beautifies everything, and I understand your transports
perfectly. As to myself, you must excuse me if I do not share them. I can
never go into ecstasies over such a country as this. I am as fond of the
country as any one, but this is not the country--it is the desert, Arabia
Petroea, I know not what. And as to your chateau, my dear friend--I am
sorry to tell you so: it