France -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; French fiction -- Translations into English
“You are really a remarkable man,” said the Abbe de Grancey, who, of
course, had watched and understood the lawyer. The Vicar-General had
come to introduce to him a Canon who needed his professional advice.
“You are a priest who has taken the wrong turning.” This observation
struck Savarus.
Rosalie, on her part, had made up her mind, in her strong girl’s head,
to get Monsieur de Savarus into the drawing-room and acquainted with
the society of the Hotel de Rupt. So far she had limited her desires
to seeing and hearing Albert. She had compounded, so to speak, and a
composition is often no more than a truce.
Les Rouxey, the inherited estate of the Wattevilles, was worth just ten
thousand francs a year; but in other hands it would have yielded a great
deal more. The Baron in his indifference--for his wife was to have, and
in fact had, forty thousand francs a year--left the management of les
Rouxey to a sort of factotum, an old servant of the Wattevilles named
Modinier. Nevertheless, whenever the Baron and his wife wished to go
out of the town, they went to les Rouxey, which is very picturesquely
situated. The chateau and the park were, in fact, created by the famous
Watteville, who in his active old age was passionately attached to this
magnificent spot.
Between two precipitous hills--little peaks with bare summits known
as the great and the little Rouxey--in the heart of a ravine where the
torrents from the heights, with the Dent de Vilard at their head, come
tumbling to join the lovely upper waters of the Doubs, Watteville had a
huge dam constructed, leaving two cuttings for the overflow. Above this
dam he made a beautiful lake, and below it two cascades; and these,
uniting a few yards below the falls, formed a lovely little river
to irrigate the barren, uncultivated valley, and these two hills he
enclosed in a ring fence, and built himself a retreat on the dam, which
he widened to two acres by accumulating above it all the soil which had
to be removed to make a channel for the river and the irrigation canals.
When the Baron de Watteville thus obtained the lake above his dam he
was owner of the two hills, but not of the upper valley thus flooded,
through which there had been at all times a right-of-way to where it
ends in a horseshoe under the Dent de Vilard. But this ferocious old man
was so widely dreaded, that so long as he lived no claim was urged by
the inhabitants of Riceys, the little village on the further side of
the Dent de Vilard. When the Baron died, he left the slopes of the two
Rouxey hills joined by a strong wall, to protect from inundation the two
lateral valleys opening into the valley of Rouxey, to the right and left
at the foot of the Dent de Vilard. Thus he died the master of the Dent
de Vilard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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