The Comtesse de Presles is lovely, rich, aristocratic, a widow, and two-and-twenty. For her the universe is the sunniest and most delightful affair. She revels in her beauty, her wealth, her youth, her freedom: but so many charms are accompanied with certain penalties. The Countess is persecuted by the crowd of her adorers; and at last, in order to escape their importunities, in very despair she accepts the addresses of the Duc d'Auberive, a gentleman of forty years, _bien sonnées_, stiff, grand, all that there is of the most patrician--a man whose ancestors have made their own terms with the Kings of France--a man whose great-grandfather's arrogance would have defied the throne, had it not been strangled by the iron hand of a Richelieu. Affianced to this gentleman, whom she respects but does not love, Léonie de Presles is tranquil. Her lovers can no longer molest her. The name of the Duc d'Auberive will serve as an ægis, before which the most presumptuous of these _soupirants_ must retire abashed. No, not the most presumptuous. There is the Marquis, the most utter scapegrace amongst them all. The man whose case was of all others most hopeless--_le dernier des derniers_; the rejected of the rejected; poor, out-at-elbows--morally, not actually, for he makes his creditors dress him handsomely in spite of themselves--dissipated, reckless; a man who has squandered an enormous fortune at _lansquenet_, and has lampooned the Pompadour; a man who at any moment may be consigned to the darkest underground cell in the Bastille, to finish his worthless life in the society of rats and spiders. And this man dares to pursue the lovely Countess with his insolent importunities. He dares even more. He tells her that she shall marry him. Yes; though he is poor and worthless and a scapegrace--though he has lost all his money at _lansquenet_--though she has affianced herself to that respectable idiot the Duke. He loves her. Is not that enough? As to the fortune he has lost--a bagatelle! For her sake he will win another fortune. As for the fury of the Pompadour--he defies the Pompadour. For Léonie's sake he will do any thing that is desperate--save the King's life when it has not been in peril; discover the details of a great political plot that has never existed; do something to win the favour of the monarch himself, in spite of the Pompadour.