The Cusances were an old, distinguished, and very wealthy family in the Franche Comté, when the Comté was still a province, not of France, but of the Empire. At the present time the "Almanach de Gotha" knows them no more, nor any French or German "Peerage." But in their own day they ranked among the best of bloods; the strains of the Hapsburghs and the Granvelles mingled in their veins. "Gentillesse de Cusance" had in whilom Burgundy become a proverbial saying. The family owned a wide tract of territory in the mountainous country through which flows the Doubs, and among those hills, forming part of the Jura, stood, twenty miles from Besançon, their Castle Belvoir. Of this proud family Beatrix was, with two sisters--one of whom became a nun, while the other married a cousin on the mother's side, a Count de Berghes, of the Low Countries--left the last offspring. There was no male to perpetuate the name. At twenty she was known as "la personne la plus belle et la plus accomplie de la province." People raved about her. Abbé Hugo, the Lorrain Duke's father-confessor, in his MS. History (which has never been published, for fear of giving offence to the French), describes her as "of a little more than middle height, and exquisitely proportioned." "She possessed," he said, "just sufficient _embonpoint_ to impart to her _une mine haute et un port majestueux_." Her face, something between oval and round, was marked by a particularly clear complexion and an animated expression. Her eyes were blue and well-placed; her hair was of a light ash colour; her mouth was small, and of a brilliant red; her teeth were of pearly whiteness, and well-ranged; neck, arms, hands were all "beautifully delicate, white, and admirably shaped"; in fact, you could not desire a more perfect specimen of feminine humanity. With this beauty it was the happy, or unhappy, lot of the no less engaging Charles IV. to become acquainted at the impressionable age of thirty, when to the eye, at any rate, he represented all that was manly and chivalrous. He was then the beau-ideal of the sex, unequalled in all accomplishments peculiar to the privileged Man of the tip-top strata, a brilliant horseman, fencer, tilter, and love-maker in the bargain--a veritable "Don Juan, alike in love and in politics," as his own historian, M. des Robert, has aptly styled him.