aps, because
it enabled him to show a neck like that of the sleekest abbe. His shoes
were noticeable for their square buckles, a style of which the present
generation has no knowledge; these buckles were fastened to a square of
polished black leather. The chevalier allowed two watch-chains to hang
parallel to each other from each of his waistcoat pockets,--another
vestige of the eighteenth century, which the Incroyables had not
disdained to use under the Directory. This transition costume, uniting
as it did two centuries, was worn by the chevalier with the high-bred
grace of an old French marquis, the secret of which is lost to France
since the day when Fleury, Mole's last pupil, vanished.

The private life of this old bachelor was apparently open to all eyes,
though in fact it was quite mysterious. He lived in a lodging that was
modest, to say the best of it, in the rue du Cours, on the second floor
of a house belonging to Madame Lardot, the best and busiest washerwoman
in the town. This circumstance will explain the excessive nicety of his
linen. Ill-luck would have it that the day came when Alencon was guilty
of believing that the chevalier had not always comported himself as a
gentleman should, and that in fact he was secretly married in his old
age to a certain Cesarine,--the mother of a child which had had the
impertinence to come into the world without being called for.

"He had given his hand," as a certain Monsieur du Bousquier remarked,
"to the person who had long had him under irons."

This horrible calumny embittered the last days of the dainty chevalier
all the more because, as the present Scene will show, he had lost a hope
long cherished to which he had made many sacrifices.

Madame Lardot leased to the chevalier two rooms on the second floor of
her house, for the modest sum of one hundred francs a year. The worthy
gentleman dined out every day, returning only in time to go to bed. His
sole expense therefore was for breakfast, invariably composed of a cup
of chocolate, with bread and butter and fruits in their season. He made
no fire except in the coldest winter, and then only enough to get up
by. Between eleven and four o'clock he walked about, went to read the
papers, and paid visits. From the time of his settling in Alencon he had
nobly admitted his poverty, saying that his whole fortune consisted in
an annuity of six hundred francs a year, the sole remains of his former
opulence,--a property which