And--almost despite himself--he accumulated immense wealth, not only for his nephew, but also for himself. He, too, had inherited quite a substantial fortune from his mother, who was the sister and co-heiress of the Marquis de Rouverdain. His capital he lent to the State at interest, and he kept up the fabric of his Chateau of La Vieuville; but beyond that he spent nothing on himself. He only looked upon himself as the administrator of his nephew's patrimony--as the chief overseer of the Maurel foundries. People called him a miser, and he was that in a sense, for money in his hands perpetually begat money. The gossip of the village had it that Ronnay de Maurel hardly knew how to read and write. That, of course, was mischievous. The days of the Terror and the Revolution did not allow of grand tours abroad, of courses at the Sorbonne, or of dancing and deportment classes; but old Gaston taught Ronnay all that he knew himself, even though he brought him up as a peasant. The lad wore a peasant's blouse and sabots on his feet; he was ten years old before he tasted any meat, twelve before he opened a book. But when, at fifteen years of age, he joined the army of the Republic, he fought like a hero until that Austrian bullet disabled him; then he retired--a Grand-Eagle of the Legion of Honour, one of the twenty men in the whole of France whom the newly-crowned Emperor thus honoured and trusted most. It was at Austerlitz that Ronnay de Maurel got the wound which had lamed him for life. Napoleon sent him home to look after the de Maurel munitions factory, and, incidentally, to keep an eye on the hot-headed Royalists of Normandy, who were still brewing mischief against the new Empire and trafficking with the foreigners against their own country. Ronnay de Maurel returned to La Frontenay covered with honours, but eleven years' campaigning in Italy and on the Danube, under General Bonaparte, did not tend to the softening of manners or the acquisition of social graces. In the early days of the Republic and the Directorate--and even of the Consulate--campaigning meant fighting often on an empty stomach, nearly always with insufficient clothing; it meant tramping shoeless through the snows of the Alps or sleeping shelterless on the sodden bog-lands of Belgium. It meant living in comradeship with all the scum of humanity which the Republican Government had scraped together, in order to compose an army numerous enough to stand up against the overwhelmingly superior forces arraigned against France. It meant all that and more for many years; and when de Maurel obtained at twenty-six the grade of general of division--for promotion was over-quick then under the eye of the greatest war-lord the world has ever known--and donned the gorgeous uniform of an officer of high rank in the Imperial army, he knew neither how to enter a drawing-room, nor how to kiss a lady's hand. He knew less than did the sons of the more