Charlotte's Inheritance E-Book

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

• Herausgeber: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

English author of Victorian "sensation" novels. Braddon was an extremely prolific writer, producing some 75 novels with very inventive plots. The most famous one is Lady Audley's Secret (1862), which won her recognition and fortune as well. The novel has been in print ever since, and has been dramatised and filmed several times. Braddon also founded Belgravia Magazine (1866), which presented readers with serialized sensation novels, poems, travel narratives, and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history, science.

Leseprobe

Charlotte's Inheritance

by

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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Book the first. De Profundis.

Lenoble of Beaubocage.

In this Wide World I Stand Alone.

“Past Hope, and in Despair.”

A Decree of Banishment.

Book the Second. Downhill.

The Fate of Susan Lenoble.

Forgiven Too Late.

Gustave the Second.

Book the Third. The Horatiad.

Chiefly Retrospective.

Epistolary.

Too Clever, for a Catspaw.

Captain Paget is Paternal.

The Captain’s Coadjutor.

Book the Fourth. Gustave in England.

Halcyon Days.

Captain Paget Awakens to a Sense of His Duty.

“What Do We Here, My Heart and i?”

Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth.

Book the Fifth. The First Act of Mr. Sheldon’s Drama.

Taken by Storm.

Firm as a Book.

Against Wind and Tide.

Diana Asks for a Holiday.

Assurance Doubly Sure.

Book the Sixth. Diana in Normandy.

At côtenoir.

Book the Seventh. A Cloud of Fear.

The Beginning of Sorrow.

Fading.

Mrs. Woolper is Anxious.

Valentine’s Skeleton.

At Harold’s Hill.

Desperate Measures.

Book the Eighth. A Fight Against Time.

A Dread Revelation.

Phoenicians are Rising.

The Sortes Virgilianae.

Book the Ninth. Through the Furnace

Something Too Much.

Dr. Jedd’s Opinion.

Non Dormit Judas.

Counting the Cost.

The Beginning of the End.

Confusion Worse Confounded.

“There is a Word Will Priam Turn to Stone.”

Book the Tenth. Harbour, After Many Shipwrecks.

Out of the Dark Valley.

After the Wedding.

Greek Against Greek.

Only a Dream.

Bohemian Independence.

Beyond the Veil.

Better than Gold.

Lost Sight of.

Eteocles and Polynices.

“According to Their Deeds.”

Book the first.

De Profundis.

Chapter 1

Lenoble of Beaubocage.

In the days when the Bourbon reigned over Gaul, before the “simple, sensuous, passionate” verse of Alfred de Musset had succeeded the débonnaire Muse of Béranger in the affections of young France — in days when the site of the Trocadero was a remote and undiscovered country, and the word “exposition” unknown in the Academic dictionary, and the Gallic Augustus destined to rebuild the city yet an exile — a young law-student boarded, in common with other students, in a big dreary-looking house at the corner of the Rue Grande–Mademoiselle, abutting on the Place Lauzun, and within some ten minutes walk of the Luxembourg. It was a very dingy quarter, though noble gentlemen and lovely ladies had once occupied the great ghastly mansions, and disported themselves in the gruesome gardens. But the young students were in nowise oppressed by the ghastliness of their abode. They sang their Béranger, and they pledged each other in cheap Bordeaux, and clinked their glasses noisily in their boisterous good-fellowship, and ate the messes compounded for them in a darksome cupboard, known as the kitchen, by old Nanon the cook, purblind, stone-deaf, and all but imbecile, and popularly supposed to be the venerable mother of Madame Magnotte. The youngsters grumbled to each other about the messes when they were unusually mysterious; and it must be owned that there were vol-au-vents and fricandeaux consumed in that establishment which were awful and wonderful in their nature; but they ventured on no complaint to the mistress of the mansion. She was a grim and terrible personage. Her terms were low, and she treated her boarders de haute en bas. If they were not content with her viands, they might go and find more agreeable viands elsewhere.

Madame Magnotte was altogether mysterious and inscrutable. Some people said that she was a countess, and that the wealth and lands of her family had been confiscated by the committee of public unsafety in ‘93. Others declared that she had been a popular actress in a small theatre in the days of Napoleon. She was tall and thin — nay, of an exceptional leanness — and her complexion was of a more agreeable yellow than the butter that appeared on her hospitable board; but she had flashing black eyes, and a certain stateliness of gait and grandeur of manner that impressed those young Bohemians, her boarders, with a kind of awe. They talked of her as the “countess,” and by that name she was known to all inmates of the mansion; but in all their dealings with her they treated her with unfailing respect.

One of the quietest among the young men who enjoyed the privileges of Madame Magnotte’s abode was a certain Gustave Lenoble, a law-student, the only son of a very excellent couple who lived on their own estate, near an obscure village in Normandy. The estate was of the smallest; a dilapidated old house, known in the immediate neighbourhood as “the Château,” and very dear to those who resided therein; a garden, in which everything seemed to have run to seed; and about forty acres of the poorest land in Normandy. These possessions constituted the patrimonial estate of Francois Lenoble, propriétaire, of Beaubocage, near Vevinordin, the department of Eure.

The people amongst whom the good man lived his simple life called him M. Lenoble de Beaubocage, but he did not insist upon this distinction; and on sending out his only son to begin the battle of life in the great world of Paris, he recommended the young man to call himself Lenoble, tout court.

The young man had never cherished any other design. He was of all creatures the least presuming or pretentious. The father was Legitimist to the very marrow; the son half Buonapartist, half republican. The father and son had quarrelled about these differences of opinion sometimes in a pleasantly disputatious manner; but no political disagreement could lesser the love between these two. Gustave loved his parents as only a Frenchman can venture to love his father and mother — with a devotion for the gentleman that bordered on enthusiasm, with a fond reverence for the lady that was the very essence of chivalry. There was a sister, who regarded her brother Gustave as the embodiment of all that is perfect in youthful mankind; and there were a couple of old house-servants, a very stupid clumsy lad in the stables, and half a dozen old mongrel dogs, born and bred on the premises, who seemed to share the young lady’s opinions. There was not a little discussion upon the subject of Gustave Lenoble’s future career; and it was not without difficulty that the father could be persuaded to approve the choice of a profession which the young man had made. The seigneur of Beaubocage cherished an exaggerated pride of race little suspected by those who saw his simple life, and were pleased by his kindly unaffected manners. The house of Lenoble, at some remote and almost mythical period of history, had distinguished itself in divers ways; and those bygone grandeurs, vague and shadowy in the minds of all others, seemed very real to Monsieur Lenoble. He assured his son that no Lenoble had ever been a lawyer. They had been always lords of the soil, living on their own lands, which had once stretched wide and far in that Norman province; a fact proved by certain maps in M. Lenoble’s possession, the paper whereof was worn and yellow with age. They had stooped to no profession save that of arms. One seigneur of Beaubocage had fought under Bayard himself; another had fallen at Pavia, on that great day when all was lost