The noble lady, Ortenzia, Duchesse de Castellucchio, who was now riding from Paris to Nancy on her way to cross the Alps and, later, to join her own family, that of the Scoriatis, had some few years before this made almost a similar journey to France, there to marry her countryman the Duc de Castellucchio, a man whose family, originally poor, had followed Concino Concini--the Maréchal d'Ancre--into France, but had managed to escape the awful end that had overtaken both him and his wife. Having escaped such a fate as the assassination of the former or the execution by burning of the latter, as well as any other forms of death which the creatures of those once powerful adventurers might well have expected to overtake them, the family thrived and prospered. Steering clear of political machinations until the Concinis were almost forgotten and, indeed, until Louis le Juste was himself in his grave, they devoted themselves to commerce and, above all, to money lending and, thereby, grew rich. But when, at last, Mazarin's star was in the ascendant as it became shortly after the death of Richelieu, they attached themselves to his fortunes, while, as he grew all powerful, so did they who, coming to France almost paupers, were now enormously wealthy. One grief there was, however, that fell heavily on old Felice Ventura who had, by this time, become Monsieur le Duc de Castellucchio (he having decided to confer honour on his birthplace by taking its name for his title), and that grief was that his only son and successor gave signs of becoming a maniac, if he were not already one. Always strange as a boy, this son had, as a young man, given still more astonishing signs of mental derangement, and, a short time after he had espoused Ortenzia Scoriati, the daughter of a noble and wealthy Milanese family, he was regarded and spoken of not only as a lunatic but a dangerous one. For, from such outbreaks as rousing the whole house from their beds by saying that a ghost was wandering round it, and by dragging his wife out of her own bed by the hair to look for the apparition; by not allowing any footmen to be in his service who were under seventy, in case his wife should fall in love with them, and by breaking up all the statues he owned (which his father had collected at an enormous cost) since he proclaimed such things to be heathen and profligate, he proceeded to greater extremities. He invariably tore the patches off his wife's face whenever she placed them on it, saying that they were the allurements used by giddy women; he insisted next that his wife should have her teeth drawn so that she should become hideous in the eyes of the world, and it was only by the flight from him which she was now undertaking that the Duchess was able to prevent herself from being thus disfigured for the rest of her life.