With that thought, after staring hard at the chateau in some little wonderment, he turned aside from the road that led to its entrance and made for the village.
His mother had died the year before; his father and his sister, with one or two attendants, lived alone.

There was no noble blood in Marteau's veins, as noble blood is counted, but his family had been followers and dependents of the Aumeniers for as many generations as that family had been domiciled in France.

Young Jean Marteau had not only been Laure d'Aumenier's playmate, but he had been her devoted slave as well.

To what extent that devotion had possessed him he had not known until returning from the military school he had found her gone.
The intercourse between the young people had been of the frankest and pleasantest character, but, in spite of the sturdy respectability of the family and the new principles of equality born of the revolution, young Marteau realized--and if he had failed to do so his father had enlightened him--that there was no more chance of his becoming a suitor, a welcome suitor, that is, for the hand of Laure d'Aumenier than there was of his becoming a Marshal of France.
Indeed, as in the case of many another soldier, that last was not an impossibility.

Men infinitely more humble than he in origin and with less natural ability and greatly inferior education had attained that high degree.