ur position to take," said the
Count, placing the index of the right hand successively on the thumb and
three fingers of the left,--"four courses, and no more.

"First. To do as your notary recommended: consolidate your mortgages,
patch up your income as you best can, return to Rochebriant, and devote
the rest of your existence to the preservation of your property. By that
course your life will be one of permanent privation, severe struggle;
and the probability is that you will not succeed: there will come one
or two bad seasons, the farmers will fail to pay, the mortgagee will
foreclose, and you may find yourself, after twenty years of anxiety and
torment, prematurely old and without a sou.

"Course the second. Rochebriant, though so heavily encumbered as to
yield you some such income as your father gave to his chef de cuisine,
is still one of those superb 'terres' which bankers and Jews and
stock-jobbers court and hunt after, for which they will give enormous
sums. If you place it in good hands, I do not doubt that you could
dispose of the property within three months, on terms that would leave
you a considerable surplus, which, invested with judgment, would afford
you whereon you could live at Paris in a way suitable to your rank and
age. Need we go further?--does this course smile to you?"

"Pass on, Count; I will defend to the last what I take from my
ancestors, and cannot voluntarily sell their roof-tree and their tombs."

"Your name would still remain, and you would be just as well received
in Paris, and your 'noblesse' just as implicitly conceded, if all Judaea
encamped upon Rochebriant. Consider how few of us 'gentilshommes' of
the old regime have any domains left to us. Our names alone survive: no
revolution can efface them."

"It may be so, but pardon me; there are subjects on which we cannot
reason,--we can but feel. Rochebriant may be torn from me, but I cannot
yield it."

"I proceed to the third course. Keep the chateau and give up its
traditions; remain 'de facto' Marquis of Rochebriant, but accept the new
order of things. Make yourself known to the people in power. They will
be charmed to welcome you a convert from the old noblesse is a guarantee
of stability to the new system. You will be placed in diplomacy;
effloresce into an ambassador, a minister,--and ministers nowadays have
opportunities to become enormously rich."

"That course is not less impossible than the last. Till Henry V.
formally