The things we do!

le Duc and Madame la Duchesse d'Ivry, and from the vivacious Florac's
statement regarding his kinsman, that that woman will kill him.
There is this at least to be said, that if the Duc d'Ivry did die he was
a very old gentleman, and had been a great viveur for at least threescore
years of his life. As Prince de Moncontour in his father's time before
the Revolution, during the Emigration, even after the Restoration, M. le
Duc had vecu with an extraordinary vitality. He had gone through good and
bad fortune: extreme poverty, display and splendour, affairs of love--
affairs of honour,--and of one disease or another a man must die at the
end. After the Baden business--and he had dragged off his wife to
Champagne--the Duke became greatly broken; he brought his little daughter
to a convent at Paris, putting the child under the special guardianship
of Madame de Florac, with whom and with whose family in these latter days
the old chief of the house effected a complete reconciliation.


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