at first thought the same. But there was one man more
difficult to deceive than the whole town put together. The Chevalier
de Valois, who had taken refuge on the Sacred Mount of the upper
aristocracy, now passed his life at the d'Esgrignons. He listened to
the gossip and the gabble, and he thought day and night upon his
vengeance. He meant to strike du Bousquier to the heart.

The poor abbe fully understood the baseness of this first and last
love of his niece; he shuddered as, little by little, he perceived the
hypocritical nature of his nephew and his treacherous manoeuvres.
Though du Bousquier restrained himself, as he thought of the abbe's
property, and wished not to cause him vexation, it was his hand that
dealt the blow that sent the old priest to his grave. If you will
interpret the word /intolerance/ as /firmness of principle/, if you do
not wish to condemn in the catholic soul of the Abbe de Sponde the
stoicism which Walter Scott has made you admire in the puritan soul of
Jeanie Deans' father; if you are willing to recognize in the Roman
Church the Potius mori quam foedari that you admire in republican
tenets,--you will understand the sorrow of the Abbe de Sponde when he
saw in his niece's salon the apostate priest, the renegade, the
pervert, the heretic, that enemy of the Church, the guilty taker of
the Constitutional oath. Du Bousquier, whose secret ambition was to
lay down the law to the town, wished, as a first proof of his power,
to reconcile the minister of Saint-Leonard with the rector of the
parish, and he succeeded. His wife thought he had accomplished a work
of peace where the immovable abbe saw only treachery. The bishop came
to visit du Bousquier, and seemed glad of the cessation of
hostilities. The virtues of the Abbe Francois had conquered prejudice,
except that of the aged Roman Catholic, who exclaimed with Cornelle,
"Alas! what virtues do you make me hate!"

The abbe died when orthodoxy thus expired in the diocese.

In 1819, the property of the Abbe de Sponde increased Madame du
Bousquier's income from real estate to twenty-five thousand francs
without counting Prebaudet or the house in the Val-Noble. About this
time du Bousquier returned to his wife the capital of her savings
which she had yielded to him; and he made her use it in purchasing
lands contiguous to Prebaudet, which made that domain one of the most
considerable in the department, for the estates of the Abbe de Sponde
also adjoine