hat seven hundred
thousand livres more in the house would make it worth while to overlook
some levities of behaviour; and the marquis, obeying the impulse given,
was trying, by kind dealing, to oppose his wife's still unsettled
intention of making a will.

Towards the autumn there was talk of going to spend that season at
Ganges, a little town situated in Lower Languedoc, in the diocese of
Montpellier, seven leagues from that town, and nineteen from Avignon.
Although this was natural enough, since the marquis was lord of the town
and had a castle there, the marquise was seized by a strange shudder when
she heard the proposal. Remembrance of the prediction made to her
returned immediately to her mind. The recent and ill explained attempt
to poison her, too, very naturally added to her fears.

Without directly and positively suspecting her brothers-in-law of that
crime, she knew that in them she had two implacable enemies. This journey
to a little town, this abode in a lonely castle, amid new, unknown
neighbours, seemed to her of no good omen; but open opposition would have
been ridiculous. On what grounds, indeed, could she base resistance?
The marquise could only own her terrors by accusing her husband and her
brothers-in-law. And of what could she accuse them? The incident of the
poisoned cream was not a conclusive proof. She resolved accordingly to
lock up all her fears in her heart, and to commit herself to the hands of
God.

Nevertheless, she would not leave Avignon without signing the will which
she had contemplated making ever since M. de Nocheres' death. A notary
was called in who drew up the document. The Marquise de Ganges made her
mother, Madame de Rossan, her sole inheritor, and left in her charge the
duty of choosing between the testatrix's two children as to which of them
should succeed to the estate. These two children were, one a boy of six
years old, the other a girl of five. But this was not enough for the
marquise, so deep was her impression that she would not survive this
fatal journey; she gathered together, secretly and at night, the
magistrates of Avignon and several persons of quality, belonging to the
first families of the town, and there, before them, verbally at first,
declared that, in case of her death, she begged the honourable witnesses
whom she had assembled on purpose, not to recognise as valid, voluntary,
or freely written anything except the will which she had signed the day