ntury a successor of Severin gave it in fief to
Norbert, a younger son of the house of Normandy, in consideration of an
annual quit-rent of sixty sous, and on the condition that the city of
Beaumont and its church should remain free and unincumbered. It was in
this way that Norbert I became the head of the Marquesses of Hautecoeur,
whose famous line from that date became so well known in history. Herve
IV, excommunicated twice for his robbery of ecclesiastical property,
became a noted highwayman, who killed, on a certain occasion, with his
own hands, thirty citizens, and his tower was razed to the ground by
Louis le Gros, against whom he had dared to declare war. Raoul I, who
went to the Crusades with Philip Augustus, perished before Saint Jean
d'Acre, having been pierced through the heart by a lance. But the most
illustrious of the race was John V, the Great, who, in 1225, rebuilt the
fortress, finishing in less than five years this formidable Chateau of
Hautecoeur, under whose shelter he, for a moment, dreamed of aspiring
to the throne of France, and after having escaped from being killed in
twenty battles, he at last died quietly in his bed, brother-in-law to
the King of Scotland. Then came Felician III, who made a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem barefooted; Herve VII, who asserted his claims to the throne
of Scotland; and still many others, noble and powerful in their day
and generation, down to Jean IX, who, under Mazarin, had the grief of
assisting at the dismantling of the castle. After a desperate siege, the
vaults of the towers and of the donjon were blown up with powder, and
the different constructions were set on fire; where Charles VI had been
sent to rest, and to turn his attention from his vagaries, and where,
nearly two hundred years later, Henri IV had passed a week as Gabrielle
D'Estress. Thenceforth, all these royal souvenirs had passed into
oblivion.

Angelique, without stopping the movement of her needle, listened
eagerly, as if the vision of these past grandeurs rose up from her
frame, in proportion as the rose grew there in its delicate life
of colour. Her ignorance of general history enlarged facts, and she
received them as if they were the basis of a marvellous legend. She
trembled with delight, and, transported by her faith, it seemed as if
the reconstructed Chateau mounted to the very gates of heaven, and the
Hautecoeurs were cousins to the Virgin Mary.

When there was a pause in the recital she asked