le Comte d'Artois, he had built for himself and his
family an imposing villa on the heights of Meudon in a miniature
park, conveniently situated for him midway between Versailles and
Paris, and easily accessible from either. M. d'Artois - the royal
tennis-player - had been amongst the very first to emigrate.
Together with the Condes, the Contis, the Polignacs, and others of
the Queen's intimate council, old Marshal de Broglie and the Prince
de Lambesc, who realized that their very names had become odious to
the people, he had quitted France immediately after the fall of the
Bastille. He had gone to play tennis beyond the frontier - and
there consummate the work of ruining the French monarchy upon which
he and those others had been engaged in France. With him, amongst
several members of his household went Etienne de Kercadiou, and with
Etienne de Kercadiou went his family, a wife and four children.
Thus it was that the Seigneur de Gavrillac, glad to escape from a
province so peculiarly disturbed as that of Brittany - where the
nobles had shown themselves the most intransigent of all France
- had come to occupy in his brother's absence the courtier's
handsome villa at Meudon.
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