A Gentleman from Gascony: A Romance of the Huguenots — page 46: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

42 A GENTLEMAN FROM GASCONY. or the soft eyes of some fair, frail damsel would scatter to the winds all his mother’s injunctions and prayers. The Bassompierres possessed but one near relative, Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Vrissac, daughter of the only sister of the duchess. Both the young lady’s par- ents had died when she was in her early teens, and Gabrielle, who was possessed of a fair fortune, was left to the joint guardianship of her aunt and a cousin by her father's side, the Vicomte Hector. She was edu- cated at the family chateau near La Rochelle, and now that her education was finished her aunt had recently brought her to Paris, and obtained for her the position of maid of honor to the Princess Marguerite, now Queen of Navarre. | | There was a time when the good duchess had hoped that his cousin’s extreme beauty and charm might win the young duke from his wayward courses, but this hope had long since vanished. The affection between the youthful couple was of too brotherly and sisterly a nature, the good-comradeship between them too frank and genuine, to leave any loophole for a deeper senti- ment to creep in. On the evening of the day of Gabrielle’s adventure at Saint Germain, Madame de Bassompierre was seated in her favorite apartment of the hdtel, a room half bou- doir, half oratory, for the duchess, as both the Bassom- pierres and her own family had ever been, was a devoted, almost bigoted Catholic. The furniture was rich and heavily carved, of. the time of Francis I.; the walls were hung with superb tapestry, emblazoned with armorial bearings. Abovethe enormous fireplace hung a full-length portrait of a warrior, with a long white beard falling over his cuirass—the late duke. On one side of the room was an alcove, containing a large and Gomicbooks (€(@) im =>)