She braved exposure, hoping to force the prince into giving
her the station she sought. All was discovered, easily, therefore. But the
old duke was all-powerful within his realm: the clandestine union was
pronounced null and void, and the countess expelled. Her latest act of
vengeance was to inform Rudolph that their child had died. This was in
1827. But this assurance was on a par with her former falseness: the child,
a girl, was handed over to Jacques Ferrand, a miserly notary in Paris,
whose housekeeper got rid of it to a rogue known as Pierre Tournemine. When
he at last ran to the end of his tether, and was sentenced to imprisonment
in the Rochefort-hulks for forgery, he induced a woman called Gervais, but
nicknamed the Screech-Owl (Chouette), to take the girl, now five or six
years old, who brought the little creature up in the midst of as much
cruelty as degradation.
Meanwhile the countess nursed the idea of wedding Prince Rudolph in a more
secure manner. When, in time, he became grand-duke, she was more eager than
ever to enjoy what she considered her own. Though he had married, she
hoped; and, the second wife having died childless, the Countess M'Gregor
followed Rudolph into Prance, where he traveled _incognito_ as Count
Duren. As a last resort to force the grand-duke into her ambitious aims,
she sought for a girl of the age that her own would have been, to pass it
off as their child.
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