The inhabitants were a hardy and determined race, frank and good-humoured, and possessing from various points in their position a great degree of simplicity in manners and character, mingled with much religious fervour. They had, indeed, of late years, been somewhat polished, or perhaps one might call it, corrupted. They had acquired more wants and more wishes from the increasing luxuriousness of the day; had heard with wonder, and not perhaps without some longing, of the splendours and the marvels and the gaieties of the court of Louis XIV., then in the bright and butterfly days of its youthful ostentation; and they felt strongly and beneficially the general impulse given to every sort of commerce by the genius of Colbert, and applied themselves to derive the utmost advantage therefrom, by pursuing with skill, activity, and perseverance, various manufactures, in which they displayed no small ingenuity. A good number of them had become wealthy, and all of them indeed were well off in the station of life in which they were placed. The artisan was rich for an artisan, as well as the burgess for a burgess; but they were all simple in their habits, not without their little pride, or without their luxuries on a holyday; but frugal and thoughtful as they were industrious. Such was the town of Morseiul and its inhabitants in the year 168--. We must now turn to the château of the count, and to its denizens at the time of the opening of our tale. The château was built, as we have said, on the outside of the walls of the town, and was one of those odd buildings of which many a specimen has come down to us. It seemed to have been built by detached impulses, and upon no general plan, though, to admit nothing but the truth, the construction was attributable all to one person. The great hall was along, wide-spreading piece of architecture, with a high roof, and a row of windows turned to the south side, which was the front of the château. Then came two or three square masses of stone-work on either side of the hall, with the gables projecting to the front, no two of them of the same height and size; and many of them separated either by a tall round tower, with loopholes all the way up, like button-holes in the front of a waistcoat, or broken towards the roof by a turret stuck on and projecting from the rest of the building. On the western side of the château was a large square tower, with numerous windows, placed with some degree of regularity; and on the eastern, was an octangular tower containing a separate entrance of a somewhat Gothic character. Two large wings projected behind towards the town on which the château unceremoniously turned its back, and the large open space of ground thus enclosed, was again divided into two by a heavy transverse mass of building, as irregular as the external parts of the whole. The mansion was completed by the stables and offices for the servants and retainers, and the whole was pitched in the centre of a platform,