CHAPTER VI

THE Château de Corbal was an unpretentious, solid mansion, perched amid vineyards halfway up the hill above the town, standing four-square, grey, and a little dilapidated, flanked by round towers under red extinguisher roofs. Within doors, the citizen-representative found the same solid unpretentiousness, stressed by faded decorations which should long since have been renewed, and shabby furnishings, much of which should long since have been burned. That this unpretentiousness extended to Corbal’s mode of life was …