it did happen.  The vicissitudes of social or private life are brought about by a crowd of little causes derived from a thousand conditions.  The man of science is forced to clear away the avalanche under which whole villages lie buried, to show you the pebbles brought down from the summit which alone can determine the formation of the mountain.  If the historian of human life were simply telling you of a suicide, five hundred of which occur yearly in Paris, the melodrama is so commonplace that brief reasons and explanations are all that need be given; but how shall he make you see that the self-destruction of an estate could happen in these days when property is reckoned of more value than life?  “De re vestra agitur,” said a maker of fables; this tale concerns the affairs and interests of all those, no matter who they be, who possess anything.

Remember that this coalition of a whole canton and of a little town against a general, who, in spite of his rash courage, had escaped the dangers of actual war, is going on in other districts against other men who seek only to do what is right by those districts.  It is a coalition which to-day threatens every man, the man of genius, the statesman, the modern agriculturalist,—­in short, all innovators.

This last explanation not only gives a true presentation of the personages of this drama, and a serious meaning even to its petty details, but it also throws a vivid light upon the scene where so many social interests are now marshalling.

CHAPTER X

THE SADNESS OF A HAPPY WOMAN

At the moment when the general was getting into his caleche to go to the Prefecture, the countess and the two gentlemen reached the gate of the Avonne, where, for the last eighteen months, Michaud and his wife Olympe had made their home.

Whose remembered the pavilion in the state in which we lately described it would have supposed it had been rebuilt.  The bricks fallen or broken by time, and the cement lacking to their edges, were replaced; the slate roof had been cleaned, and the effect of the white balustrade against its bluish background restored the gay character of the architecture.  The approaches to the building, formerly choked up and sandy, were now cared for by the man whose duty it was to keep the park roadways in order.  The poultry-yard, stables, and cow-shed, relegated to the buildings near the pheasantry and hidden by clumps of trees, instead of afflicting the eye with their foul details, now blended those soft murmurs and cooings and the sound of flapping wings, which are among the most delightful accompaniments of Nature’s eternal harmony, with the peculiar rustling sounds of the forest.  The whole scene possessed the double charm of a natural, untouched forest and the elegance of an English park.  The surroundings of the pavilion, in keeping with its own exterior, presented a certain noble, dignified, and cordial effect; while the hand of a young and happy woman gave to its interior a very different look from what it wore under the coarse neglect of Courtecuisse.