A shot resounded through the house; the fall of a heavy body shook the floor-fragments of brains strewed the carpet.  The Comte de Camors had plunged into eternity!

His last will was clenched in his hand.

To whom was this document addressed?  Upon what kind of soil will these seeds fall?

At this time Louis de Camors was twenty-seven years old.  His mother had died young.  It did not appear that she had been particularly happy with her husband; and her son barely remembered her as a young woman, pretty and pale, and frequently weeping, who used to sing him to sleep in a low, sweet voice.  He had been brought up chiefly by his father’s mistress, who was known as the Vicomtesse d’Oilly, a widow, and a rather good sort of woman.  Her natural sensibility, and the laxity of morals then reigning at Paris, permitted her to occupy herself at the same time with the happiness of the father and the education of the son.  When the father deserted her after a time, he left her the child, to comfort her somewhat by this mark of confidence and affection.  She took him out three times a week; she dressed him and combed him; she fondled him and took him with her to church, and made him play with a handsome Spaniard, who had been for some time her secretary.  Besides, she neglected no opportunity of inculcating precepts of sound morality.  Thus the child, being surprised at seeing her one evening press a kiss upon the forehead of her secretary, cried out, with the blunt candor of his age: 

“Why, Madame, do you kiss a gentleman who is not your husband?”

“Because, my dear,” replied the Countess, “our good Lord commands us to be charitable and affectionate to the poor, the infirm, and the exile; and Monsieur Perez is an exile.”

Louis de Camors merited better care, for he was a generous-hearted child; and his comrades of the college of Louis-le-Grand always remembered the warm-heartedness and natural grace which made them forgive his successes during the week, and his varnished boots and lilac gloves on Sunday.  Toward the close of his college course, he became particularly attached to a poor bursar, by name Lescande, who excelled in mathematics, but who was very ungraceful, awkwardly shy and timid, with a painful sensitiveness to the peculiarities of his person.  He was nicknamed “Wolfhead,” from the refractory nature of his hair; but the elegant Camors stopped the scoffers by protecting the young man with his friendship.  Lescande felt this deeply, and adored his friend, to whom he opened the inmost recesses of his heart, letting out some important secrets.

He loved a very young girl who was his cousin, but was as poor as himself.  Still it was a providential thing for him that she was poor, otherwise he never should have dared to aspire to her.  It was a sad occurrence that had first thrown Lescande with his cousin—­the loss of her father, who was chief of one of the Departments of State.