If he had been deceived, he had attributed the failure of his hopes hitherto to the right cause--the fallacy of his own judgment, and the error of his own choice; and the more he had been disappointed, the more firmly had he relied on what he felt certain could not change, the affection of his parents, the love of his betrothed bride. On the very instant of his landing he found himself shipwrecked in his first hope; and on his earliest interview with his uncle, in Paris, he had the agony--the utter and appalling agony to undergo--of hearing that in the only promise which he had flattered himself was yet left to him, he was destined in all probability to undergo a deeper, deadlier disappointment. If Melanie d'Argenson had been a lovely girl, the good abbe said, when she was budding out of childhood into youth, so utterly had she outstripped all the promise of her girlhood, that no words could describe, no imagination suggest to itself the charms of the mature yet youthful woman. There was no other beauty named, when loveliness was the theme, throughout all France, than that of the young betrothed of Raoul de Douarnez. And that which was so loudly and so widely bruited abroad, could not fail to reach the ever open, ever greedy ears of the vile and sensual tyrant who sat on the throne of France at that time, heaping upon his people that load of suffering and anguish which was in after times to be avenged so bitterly and bloodily upon the innocent heads of his unhappy descendants. Louis had, moreover, heard years before, nay, looked upon the nascent loveliness of Melanie d'Argenson, and, with that cold-blooded voluptuary, to look on beauty was to lust after it, to lust after it was to devote all the powers his despotism could command to win it. Hence, as the Abbe de Chastellar soon made his unfortunate nephew and pupil comprehend, a settled determination had arisen on the part of the odious despot to break off the marriage of the lovely girl with the young soldier whom it was well known that she fondly loved, and to have her the wife of one who would be less tender of his honor, and less reluctant to surrender, or less difficult to be deprived of a bride, too transcendently beautiful to bless the arms of a subject, even if he were the noblest of the noble. All this was easily arranged, the base father of Melanie was willing enough to sell his exquisite and virtuous child to the splendid infamy of becoming a king's paramour, and the yet baser Chevalier de la Rochederrien was eager to make the shameful negotiation easy, and to sanction it to the eyes of the willingly hoodwinked world, by giving his name and rank to a woman, who was to be his wife but in name, and whose charms and virtue he had precontracted to make over to another.