There had been a large party at Beaujardin, at which the marquis and marchioness, whatever may have been their disquietude at heart, had treated their guests with all their wonted courtesy and attention. Nevertheless it is likely enough that long after the numerous and distinguished visitors had retired to rest, the noble host and hostess, as well as the Baroness de Valricour, who had been present, spent more than one wakeful hour. Besides them, however, there were three other persons in the chateau who sat up till a late period of the night. In a handsomely furnished and well lighted apartment at the rear of the mansion Monsieur Boulederouloue, the steward or _maitre d'hotel_, with his special guests, Monsieur Achille Perigord, the _chef de cuisine_, and Monsieur Jasmin, the young marquis' valet, yet lingered over a flask of Chateau d'Yquem, such as all the regiments of royal butlers at Versailles could not have set before his most Christian Majesty Louis Quinze himself. The three men were in every particular about as unlike to each other as any three men could be. The valet, who possessed an unusually good face and figure, whose costume was unexceptionable, and who had acquired to perfection the ultra-courteous manners of the time, might have passed for a nobleman anywhere except alongside of a real one. One might really have been excused for fancying him of a different race of beings from Monsieur Boulederouloue, the shapelessness of whose huge unwieldy frame was happily rendered undistinguishable by an extravagantly full suit of the Louis Quatorze fashion. An enormous full-bottomed wig of the same period surmounted and flanked his full moon face of pasty whiteness, most like the battered and colourless visage of an old wax doll, in which a transverse slit does duty for a mouth, and whose deficiency in the article of nose is counterbalanced by great glassy eyes guiltless of a single atom of expression. Marvellous indeed was Monsieur Boulederouloue's stolidity in all things, and not less notable his stupidity in all but one; that one thing, however, was his business as _maitre d'hotel_, in which he was unsurpassed, unrivalled. If you told him that there had been no kings of France before Louis the Fourteenth, and that his native country was an island in the Pacific, that grass grew on trees in India, and that the stars were old moons chopped up into bits, he would have stared at you and believed it all. What did he know of such things? His father and grandfather had been stewards in the Beaujardin family before he was born; from his infancy he had seen, noted, watched, talked of, cared for only what pertained to the proper regulation of the household that constituted his little world. So he grew up, and on the day on which his father, old Mathieu Boulederouloue, departed this life, young Mathieu put on the Louis Quatorze suit and wig, and not one of the guests at the chateau could have imagined that the one functionary in