The four sons grew up as the chateau went to decay, accustomed to wind, rain, and roughing it. They were entirely neglected and abandoned by their father, and their only education consisted of a few lessons from the parish priest. From living like the peasants, and mixing with them in their work and games, they gradually became regular peasants themselves, and the roughest and strongest in the country round. When their father died the four brothers, by common consent, made over to a land agent the remaining stones of their chateau in return for a few pounds, with which to pay their most pressing debts, and an annuity of twenty pounds, which was to be paid until the death of the last of the four. They then took up their abode in the forest, which joined their estate, and lived there with the wood-cutters and in the same way as they did, making a regular den of their hut, and living there with their sweethearts or wives, peopling the forest with a half-bred race, in which the Villacourts were crossed with nature, noblemen mated with children of the forest, whose language, even, was no longer French. Some of Jean de Villacourt's old comrades in arms had tried, on his death, to do something for his children. They were interested in this name, which had been so great and had now fallen so low. In 1826 the youngest of the boys, who was scarcely more than sixteen, was brought to Paris. The little savage was clothed and presented to the Duchesse d'Angouleme: he appeared three or four times in the _salons_ of the Minister of War, who was related to his family, and who was very anxious to do something for him; but at the end of a week, feeling stifled in these drawing-rooms, and ill at ease in his clothes, he had escaped like a little wolf, gone straight back to his hiding-place, and had not come out of it again for years. Of these four Villacourts, he was the only one left at the end of twenty years. His three brothers died one after the other, and all by violent deaths; one from drunkenness, the second from illness, and the other from blows he had received in a skirmish. All three had been struck down suddenly, snatched as it were from the midst of life. Living among the bastards they had left, this last of the Villacourts was looked up to in the forest as the chieftain of a clan until 1854, when the game laws came into force. All the regulations and the supervision, the trials, fines, confiscations, and liabilities connected with the chase, which had now become his very life, and the fear of giving way to his anger some day and of putting a bullet into one of the keepers, disgusted him with this part of the world, with France, and with this land which was no longer his own.