mechanic distrusts the machine which the traveller admires; and the
officers of the army might be called the stokers of the Napoleonic

engine,--if, indeed, they were not its fuel.
However, the Baron Wallenrod-Tustall-Bartenstild promised to come if

necessary to the help of the household. Charles loved Bettina
Wallenrod as much as she loved him, and that is saying a good deal;

but when a Provencal is moved to enthusiasm all his feelings and
attachments are genuine and natural. And how could he fail to adore

that blonde beauty, escaping, as it were, from the canvas of Durer,
gifted with an angelic nature and endowed with Frankfort wealth? The

pair had four children, of whom only two daughters survived at the
time when he poured his griefs into the Breton's heart. Dumay loved

these little ones without having seen them, solely through the
sympathy so well described by Charlet, which makes a soldier the

father of every child. The eldest, named Bettina Caroline, was born in
1805; the other, Marie Modeste, in 1808. The unfortunatelieutenant-

colonel, long without tidings of these cherished darlings, was sent,
at the peace of 1814, across Russia and Prussia on foot, accompanied

by the lieutenant. No difference of epaulets could count between the
two friends, who reached Frankfort just as Napoleon was disembarking

at Cannes.
Charles found his wife in Frankfort, in mourning for her father, who

had always idolized her and tried to keep a smile upon her lips, even
by his dying bed. Old Wallenrod was unable to survive the disasters of

the Empire. At seventy years of age he speculated in cottons, relying
on the genius of Napoleon without comprehending that genius is quite

as often beyond as at the bottom of current events. The old man had
purchased nearly as many bales of cotton as the Emperor had lost men

during his magnificentcampaign in France. "I tie in goddon," said the
father to the daughter, a father of the Goriot type, striving to quiet

a grief which distressed him. "I owe no mann anything--" and he died,
still trying to speak to his daughter in the language that she loved.

Thankful to have saved his wife and daughters from the general wreck,
Charles Mignon returned to Paris, where the Emperor made him

lieutenant-colonel in the cuirassiers of the Guard and commander of
the Legion of honor. The colonel dreamed of being count and general

after the first victory. Alas! that hope was quenched in the blood of
Waterloo. The colonel, slightly wounded, retired to the Loire, and

left Tours before the disbandment of the army.
In the spring of 1816 Charles sold his wife's property out of the

funds to the amount of nearly four hundred thousand francs, intending
to seek his fortune in America, and abandon his own country where

persecution was beginning to lay a heavy hand on the soldiers of
Napoleon. He went to Havre accompanied by Dumay, whose life he had

saved at Waterloo by taking him on the crupper of his saddle in the
hurly-burly of the retreat. Dumay shared the opinions and the

anxieties of his colonel; the poor fellow idolized the two little
girls and followed Charles like a spaniel. The latter, confidence that

the habit of obedience, the discipline of subordination, and the
honesty and affection of the lieutenant would make him a useful as

well as a faithful retainer, proposed to take him with him in a civil
capacity. Dumay was only too happy to be adopted into the family, to

which he resolved to cling like the mistletoe to an oak.
While waiting for an opportunity to embark, at the same time making

choice of a ship and reflecting on the chances offered by the various
ports for which they sailed, the colonel heard much talk about the

brilliant future which the peace seemed to promise to Havre. As he
listened to these conversations among the merchants, he foresaw the

means of fortune, and without loss of time he set about making himself
the owner of landed property, a banker, and a shipping-merchant. He

bought land and houses in the town, and despatched a vessel to New
York freighted with silks purchased in Lyons at reduced prices. He

sent Dumay on the ship as his agent; and when the latter returned,
after making a double profit by the sale of the silks and the purchase

of cottons at a low valuation, he found the colonel installed with his
family in the handsomest house in the rue Royale, and studying the

principles of banking with the prodigious activity and intelligence of
a native of Provence.

This double operation of Dumay's was worth a fortune to the house of
Mignon. The colonel purchased the villa at Ingouville and rewarded his

agent with the gift of a modest little house in the rue Royale. The
poor toiler had brought back from New York, together with his cottons,

a pretty little wife, attracted it would seem by his French nature.
Miss Grummer was worth about four thousand dollars (twenty thousand

francs), which sum Dumay placed with his colonel, to whom he now
became an alter ego. In a short time he learned to keep his patron's

books, a science which, to use his own expression, pertains to the
sergeant-majors of commerce. The simple-hearted soldier, whom fortune

had forgotten for twenty years, thought himself the happiest man in
the world as the owner of the little house (which his master's

liberality had furnished), with twelve hundred francs a year from
money in the funds, and a salary of three thousand six hundred. Never

in his dreams had Lieutenant Dumay hoped for a situation so good as
this; but greater still was the satisfaction he derived from the

knowledge that his lucky enterprise had been the pivot of good fortune
to the richest commercial house in Havre.

Madame Dumay, a rather pretty little American, had the misfortune to
lose all her children at their birth; and her last confinement was so

disastrous as to deprive her of the hope of any other. She therefore
attached herself to the two little Mignons, whom Dumay himself loved,

or would have loved, even better than his own children had they lived.
Madame Dumay, whose parents were farmers accustomed to a life of

economy, was quite satisfied to receive only two thousand four hundred
francs of her own and her household expenses; so that every year Dumay

laid by two thousand and some extra hundreds with the house of Mignon.
When the yearly accounts were made up the colonel always added

something to this little store by way of acknowledging the cashier's
services, until in 1824 the latter had a credit of fifty-eight

thousand francs. In was then that Charles Mignon, Comte de La Bastie,
a title he never used, crowned his cashier with the final happiness of

residing at the Chalet, where at the time when this story begins
Madame Mignon and her daughter were living in obscurity.

The deplorable state of Madame Mignon's health was caused in part by
the catastrophe to which the absence of her husband was due. Grief had

taken three years to break down the docile German woman; but it was a
grief that gnawed at her heart like a worm at the core of a sound

fruit. It is easy to reckon up its obvious causes. Two children, dying
in infancy, had a double grave in a soul that could never forget. The

exile of her husband to Siberia was to such a woman a daily death. The
failure of the rich house of Wallenrod, and the death of her father,

leaving his coffers empty, was to Bettina, then uncertain about the
fate of her husband, a terrible blow. The joy of Charles's return came

near killing the tender German flower. After that the second fall of
the Empire and the proposed expatriation acted on her feelings like a

renewed attack of the same fever. At last, however, after ten years of
continual prosperity, the comforts of her house, which was the finest

in Havre, the dinners, balls, and fetes of a prosperous merchant, the
splendors of the villa Mignon, the unbounded respect and consideration

enjoyed by her husband, his absoluteaffection, giving her an
unrivalled love in return for her single-minded love for him,--all

these things brought the woman back to life. At the moment when her
doubts and fears at last left her, when she could look forward to the

bright evening of her stormy life, a hiddencatastrophe, buried in the
heart of the family, and of which we shall presently make mention,

came as the precursor of renewed trials.
In January, 1826, on the day when Havre had unanimously" target="_blank" title="ad.一致同意的">unanimously chosen Charles

Mignon as its deputy, three letters, arriving from New York, Paris,
and London, fell with the destruction of a hammer upon the crystal

palace of his prosperity. In an instant ruin like a vulture swooped
down upon their happiness, just as the cold fell in 1812 upon the

grand army in Russia. One night sufficed Charles Mignon to decide upon
his course, and he spent it in settling his accounts with Dumay. All

he owned, not excepting his furniture, would just suffice to pay his
creditors.

"Havre shall never see me doing nothing," said the colonel to the
lieutenant. "Dumay, I take your sixty thousand francs at six per