He brought with him
nineteen hundred thousand francs worth of gold-dust, from which he
expected to derive seven or eight per cent more at the Paris mint. On
the brig he met a gentleman-in-ordinary to His Majesty Charles X.,
Monsieur d'Aubrion, a worthy old man who had committed the folly of
marrying a woman of fashion with a fortune derived from the West India
Islands. To meet the costs of Madame d'Aubrion's extravagance, he had
gone out to the Indies to sell the property, and was now returning
with his family to France.
Monsieur and Madame d'Aubrion, of the house of d'Aubrion de Buch, a
family of southern France, whose last _captal_, or chief, died before
1789, were now reduced to an income of about twenty thousand francs,
and they possessed an ugly daughter whom the mother was resolved to
marry without a _dot_,--the family fortune being scarcely sufficient
for the demands of her own life in Paris. This was an enterprise whose
success might have seemed problematical to most men of the world, in
spite of the cleverness with which such men credit a fashionable
woman; in fact, Madame d'Aubrion herself, when she looked at her
daughter, almost despaired of getting rid of her to any one, even to a
man craving connection with nobility. Mademoiselle d'Aubrion was a
long, spare, spindling demoiselle, like her namesake the insect; her
mouth was disdainful; over it hung a nose that was too long, thick at
the end, sallow in its normal condition, but very red after a meal,--a
sort of vegetable phenomenon which is particularly disagreeable when
it appears in the middle of a pale, dull, and uninteresting face.
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