net, guileless, confident, a novice in business, and little
fitted to understand details in the management of an estate. Gaubertin
flattered himself that he could catch and hold the general with the
same net in which Mademoiselle Laguerre had finished her days. But it so
happened that the Emperor had once, intentionally, allowed Montcornet
to play the same game in Pomerania that Gaubertin was playing at
Les Aigues; consequently, the general fully understood a system of
plundering.

In planting cabbages, to use the expression of the first Duc de Biron,
the old cuirassier sought to divert his mind, by occupation, from
dwelling on his fall. Though he had yielded his "corps d'armee" to
the Bourbons, that duty (performed by other generals and termed the
disbanding of the army of the Loire) could not atone for the crime of
having followed the man of the Hundred-Days to his last battle-field.
In presence of the allied army it was impossible for the peer of 1815
to remain in the service, still less at the Luxembourg. Accordingly,
Montcornet betook himself to the country by advice of a dismissed
marshal, to plunder Nature herself. The general was not deficient in
the special cunning of an old military fox; and after he had spent a few
days in examining his new property, he saw that Gaubertin was a steward
of the old system,--a swindler, such as the dukes and marshals of the
Empire, those mushrooms bred from the common earth, were well acquainted
with.

The wily general, soon aware of Gaubertin's great experience in rural
administration, felt it was politic to keep well with him until he had
himself learned the secrets of it; accordingly, he passed himself off
as another Mademoiselle Laguerre, a course which lulled the steward into
false security. This apparent simple-mindedness lasted all the time it
took the general to learn the strength and weakness of Les Aigues, to
master the details of its revenues and the manner of collecting them,
and to ascertain how and where the robberies occurred, together with the
betterments and economies which ought to be undertaken. Then, one fine
morning, having caught Gaubertin with his hand in the bag, as the saying
is, the general flew into one of those rages peculiar to the
imperial conquerors of many lands. In doing so he committed a capital
blunder,--one that would have ruined the whole life of a man of less
wealth and less consistency than himself, and from which came the evils,
both sma