d him
excused; important business compels him to be in court this morning."

A minute later the woman reappeared and asked on madame's behalf whether
she would have the pleasure of seeing Monsieur le Comte before he went
out.

"He is gone," was always the rely, though often his carriage was still
waiting.

This little dialogue by proxy became a daily ceremonial. Granville's
servant, a favorite with his master, and the cause of more than one
quarrel over his irreligious and dissipated conduct, would even go into
his master's room, as a matter of form, when the Count was not there,
and come back with the same formula in reply.

The aggrieved wife was always on the watch for her husband's return, and
standing on the steps so as to meet him like an embodiment of remorse.
The petty aggressiveness which lies at the root of the monastic
temper was the foundation of Madame de Granville's; she was now
five-and-thirty, and looked forty. When the count was compelled by
decency to speak to his wife or to dine at home, she was only too well
pleased to inflict her company upon him, with her acid-sweet remarks and
the intolerable dulness of her narrow-minded circle, and she tried to
put him in the wrong before the servants and her charitable friends.

When, at this time, the post of President in a provincial court was
offered to the Comte de Granville, who was in high favor, he begged to
be allowed to remain in Paris. This refusal, of which the Keeper of the
Seals alone knew the reasons, gave rise to extraordinary conjectures
on the part of the Countess' intimate friends and of her director.
Granville, a rich man with a hundred thousand francs a year, belonged to
one of the first families of Normandy. His appointment to be Presiding
Judge would have been the stepping-stone to a peer's seat; whence this
strange lack of ambition? Why had he given up his great book on Law?
What was the meaning of the dissipation which for nearly six years had
made him a stranger to his home, his family, his study, to all he
ought to hold dear? The Countess' confessor, who based his hopes of a
bishopric quite as much on the families he governed as on the services
he rendered to an association of which he was an ardent propagator,
was much disappointed by Granville's refusal, and tried to insinuate
calumnious explanations: "If Monsieur le Comte had such an objection to
provincial life, it was perhaps because he dreaded finding himself under
the neces