a dozen rich families, former manufacturers
of the old point d'Alencon, owners of pastures and cattle, or merchants
doing a wholesale business in linen, among whom, as he hoped, he
might find a wealthy wife. In fact, all his hopes now converged to
the perspective of a fortunate marriage. He was not without a certain
financial ability, which many persons used to their profit. Like a
ruined gambler who advises neophytes, he pointed out enterprises and
speculations, together with the means and chances of conducting them. He
was thought a good administrator, and it was often a question of making
him mayor of Alencon; but the memory of his underhand jobbery still
clung to him, and he was never received at the prefecture. All the
succeeding governments, even that of the Hundred Days, refused to
appoint him mayor of Alencon,--a place he coveted, which, could he have
had it, would, he thought, have won him the hand of a certain old maid
on whom his matrimonial views now turned.

Du Bousquier's aversion to the Imperial government had thrown him at
first into the royalist circles of Alencon, where he remained in spite
of the rebuffs he received there; but when, after the first return
of the Bourbons, he was still excluded from the prefecture, that
mortification inspired him with a hatred as deep as it was secret
against the royalists. He now returned to his old opinions, and became
the leader of the liberal party in Alencon, the invisible manipulator of
elections, and did immense harm to the Restoration by the cleverness of
his underhand proceedings and the perfidy of his outward behavior. Du
Bousquier, like all those who live by their heads only, carried on his
hatreds with the quiet tranquillity of a rivulet, feeble apparently,
but inexhaustible. His hatred was that of a negro, so peaceful that it
deceived the enemy. His vengeance, brooded over for fifteen years, was
as yet satisfied by no victory, not even that of July, 1830.

It was not without some private intention that the Chevalier de Valois
had turned Suzanne's designs upon Monsieur du Bousquier. The liberal
and the royalist had mutually divined each other in spite of the wide
dissimulation with which they hid their common hope from the rest of the
town. The two old bachelors were secretly rivals. Each had formed a plan
to marry the Demoiselle Cormon, whom Monsieur de Valois had mentioned to
Suzanne. Both, ensconced in their idea and wearing the armor of apparent
indif