Desqueyroux whom she was one day to marry, in accordance with the wishes of both families, though the understanding was not as yet official. Bernard Desqueyroux had inherited from his father a house at Argelouse, next to that belonging to the Larroques: he was never seen there until the shooting season began, and he did not sleep there until the month of October, when he went pigeon-shooting in the neighbourhood. In the winter this sedate young gentleman studied law in Paris; and in the summer he did not spend much time with his family. He could not endure Victor de la Trave, his mother’s second husband, who had not had a penny when she married him, and whose extravagance was the scandal of Saint Clair; and his half-sister Anne seemed too young to deserve any attention from him. Nor did he think much more about Thérèse. Every one regarded their marriage as inevitable because it seemed such a pity not to combine the two estates, and he very sensibly shared the common opinion on this point. But he left nothing to chance, and took a pride in the management of his life. “If a man is unhappy he has only himself to blame,” this slightly corpulent youth was wont to observe. Until his marriage he divided his time equally between work and pleasure; and although he by no means neglected food, drink, and sport, he worked “like a galley slave,” so his mother said. A husband, he thought, ought to be better informed than his wife: and Thérèse’s intelligence was already famous. She was doubtless clever, but Bernard knew the kind of arguments to influence a woman: moreover, as his mother pointed out, it was not a bad thing to “have a leg in both camps,” and old Larroque might be useful to him. At twenty-six years of age Bernard Desqueyroux, after a few visits to Italy, Spain, and Holland, which he had carefully “got up” beforehand, would marry the richest and the cleverest girl in the neighbourhood, though not perhaps the prettiest: (“Never mind whether she is pretty or plain, you can’t resist her charm!”)