The two friends did not meet very often, though the house which Theodore de Bergerac had occupied ever since his first coming to England stood on the border of Mr. Jerningham’s park in Berkshire,--a grand old park, in the midst of which there was a great house that had once been splendid, but about which there was now a certain air of shabbiness and decay. How should a mansion preserve its warmth and grandeur when the master crossed its threshold so rarely, and during his brief visits preferred a couple of dingy chambers on the ground-floor to that spacious suite of apartments, with panelled walls and painted ceilings, in which his forefathers had held their state? M. de Bergerac was a warm partizan of the Orleans family, and in the revolution of ’48 had turned his back upon his father’s country. He had come straight to England, where he had found a fair young English wife in the person of a Berkshire curate’s eldest daughter, and had accepted the hospitality of his friend, Mr. Jerningham, so far as to occupy an old-fashioned farm-house on the borders of the park--a house which had been built for a bailiff in the days of some departed Jerningham, but which had long fallen into disuse. Harold would fain have persuaded the exile to take up his quarters in the big house, with all the lazy, over-fed retainers at his disposal; but De Bergerac ridiculed his friend’s offer. “What should I do with your thirty bedchambers,” he wrote in answer to Harold’s letter of invitation, “and your great corridors, along which one could drive a coach-and-pair, and your housekeeper in a stiff silk gown, and all your grooms and hangers-on? I would as soon live in the palace of Versailles. Even kings and queens grow tired of their palaces, you will perceive; and the man who has sunk millions in the creation of a Versailles must needs seek domestic comfort at Marly. You cannot endure your howling wilderness yourself,--you, who have been accustomed to splendid habitations,--and yet ask me to take up my abode in your thirty bedchambers, and abandon myself to the tyranny of your awful housekeeper. No, my dear Jerningham; give me the little Trianon--that tumble-down old farm-house you showed me last year, in the midst of a quaint Dutch flower-garden--and I shall be happy. All I want is a room big enough and dry enough to hold my books, and I will not envy your gracious Queen her pompous château of Windsor.”