Once or twice we were received in state at some chateau, where our
mails had to be opened that we might sup in full toilet; but this was
seldom, for most of the equals of M. le Marquis lived at Paris.
Sometimes our halt was at an abbey, where we ladies were quartered in
a guest-chamber without; and twice we slept at large old convents,
where nobody had lived since the Huguenot times, except a lay brother
put in by M. l'Abbe to look after the estate and make the house a
kind of inn for travelers. There were fine walled gardens run into
wild confusion, and little neglected and dismantled shrines, and
crosses here and there, with long wreaths of rose and honeysuckle
trailing over them, and birds' nests in curious places. My Viscount
laughed with a new pleasure when I showed him the wren's bright eye
peeping out from her nest, and he could not think how I knew the egg
of a hedge-sparrow from that of a red-breast. Even he had never been
allowed to be out of sight of his tutor, and he knew none of these
pleasures so freely enjoyed by my brothers; while as to his sister
Cecile, she had been carried from her nurse to a convent, and had
thence been taken at fourteen to be wedded to the grandson and heir
of the Count d'Aubepine, who kept the young couple under their own
eye at their castle in the Bocage.

My husband had absolutely only seen her twice, and then through the
grating, and the marriage had taken place while he was in Savoy last
autumn. He knew his brother-in-law a little better, having been his
neighbour at Nid de Merle; but he shrugged his shoulders as he spoke
of 'le chevalier,' and said he was very young, adored by his
grandparents, and rather headstrong.

As to growing up together in the unity that had always existed