Chapter III
Reading edition
Bertrande Hautville Montaigne du Biffington was not an orphan.
He was an Ancient and Excepted Odd Fellow.
He was of a noble and numerous parentage. He had one mother, and she was a Chicago printcess. She used to hold brevier cases on The Daily Tomahawk. She had ten divorces, neatly framed, hanging up in her parlor, and Bertrande, whose own original father had died of an hereditary attack of arsenic in the soup while his divorce suit was pending, was successively flogged by an illustrious line of paternal incumbents, and acknowledged the sway of one father, full rank, and ten fathers by brevet. He loved the lonely orphan, who had no parents whatever, from a sense of natural duty and justice, to kind of even the thing up and strike an equitable average.