Hence as the abbé de Chastellar soon made his unfortunate nephew and pupil comprehend, a settled determination had arisen on the part of the odious despot to break off the marriage of the lovely girl with the young soldier whom it was well known that she fondly loved, and to have her the wife of one who would be less tender of his honor, and less reluctant to surrender, or less difficult to be deprived of a bride, too transcendently beautiful to bless the arms of a subject, even if he were the noblest of the noble. All this was easily arranged, the base father of Melanie was willing enough to sell his exquisite and virtuous child to the splendid infamy of becoming a king’s paramour, and the yet baser chevalier de la Rochederrien was eager to make the shameful negotiation easy, and to sanction it to the eyes of the willingly hoodwinked world, by giving his name and rank to a woman, who was to be his wife but in name, and whose charms and virtue he had precontracted to make over to another. The infamous contract had been agreed upon by the principal actors; nay, the wages of the iniquity had been paid in advance. The sieur d’Argenson had grown into the comte of the same, with the governorship of the town of Morlaix added, by the revenues of which to support his new dignities; while the chevalier de la Rochederrien had become no less a personage than the marquis de Ploermel, with a captaincy in the musquetaires, and Heaven knows what beside of honorary title and highly-gilded sinecure, whereby to reconcile him to such depth of sordid infamy as the meanest galley-slave could have scarce undertaken as the price of exchange between his fetters and his oars, and the great noble’s splendor. Such were the tidings which greeted Raoul on his return from honorable service to his king--service for which he was thus repaid; and, before he had even time to reflect on the consequences, or to comprehend the anguish thus entailed upon him, his eyes were opened instantly to comprehension of two or three occurrences which previously he had been unable to explain to himself, or even to guess at their meaning by any exercise of ingenuity. The first of these was the singular ignorance in which he had been kept of the death of his parents by the government officials in the East, and the very evident suppression of the letters which, as his uncle informed him, had been despatched to summon him with all speed homeward. The second was the pertinacity with which he had been thrust forward, time after time, on the most desperate and deadly duty--a pertinacity so striking, that, eager as the young soldier was, and greedy of any chance of winning honor, it had not failed to strike him that _he_ was frequently _ordered_ on duty of a nature which, under ordinary circumstances, is performed by volunteers.