“Ay, Zélie values zeal,” the clerk would reply to anyone who made such a remark.
This piece of scandal was, however, improbable. Since the birth of her son, whom she nursed herself, though it was impossible to see how, the postmistress had thought only of adding to her fortune, and devoted herself without respite to the management of her immense business. To rob her of a truss of straw or a few bushels of oats, to detect her in error in the most complicated accounts, was a thing impossible, though she wrote a cat’s scrawl, and knew nothing of arithmetic beyond addition and subtraction. She walked out solely to inspect her hay, her oats, and her after-crops; then she would send her man to fetch in the crops, and her postilions to pack the hay, and tell them within a hundredweight how much they could get off this or that field. Though she was the soul of the huge body known as Minoret-Levrault, and led him by his idiotically snub nose, she was liable to the frights which more or less constantly agitate those who quell and lead wild beasts, and she quarreled with him frequently. The postboys knew by the rowings they got from Minoret when his wife had scolded him, for her rage glanced off on to them. But, indeed, Madame Minoret was as shrewd as she was avaricious.
“Where would Minoret be without his wife?” was a byword in more than one household in the town.
“When you hear what is happening to us you will be beside yourself too,” replied the Master of Nemours.
“Well, what is it?”
“Ursule has taken Doctor Minoret to Mass.”
Zélie Levrault’s eyes seemed to dilate; for an instant she was silent, yellow with rage; then crying, “I must see it to believe it,” she rushed into the church. The Host was just elevated. Favored by the general attitude of worship, she was able to look along each row of chairs and benches as she went up past the chapels to the place where Ursule knelt, and by her side she saw the old man, bareheaded.
If you can recall the portraits of Barbé-Marbois, Boissy-d’Anglas, Morellet, Helvétius, and Frédérick the Great, you will have an exact idea of the head of Doctor Minoret, who in his green old age was a good deal like these famous personages. These heads, struck as it might seem from the same die, for they lend themselves to the medalist’s art, present a severe and almost puritanical profile, cold coloring, a mathematical brain, a certain narrowness of face, as if it had been squeezed, astute eyes, grave lips, and something aristocratic in sentiment rather than in habits, in the intellect rather than in the character. They all have lofty foreheads, receding a little at the top, which betrays a tendency to materialism. You will find all these leading characteristics of the head, and the look of the face, in the portraits of the encyclopedists, of the orators of the Girondins, and of the men of that time whose religious belief was almost a blank, and who, though calling themselves deists, were atheists. A deist is an atheist with an eye to the off-chance of some advantage.
Old Minoret had a forehead of this type, but furrowed with wrinkles, and it derived a sort of childlike ingenuousness from the way in which his silver hair, combed back like a woman’s at her toilet, curled in thin locks on his black coat; for he persisted in dressing, as in the days of his youth, in black silk stockings, shoes with gold buckles, knee-breeches of rich silk, a white waistcoat, across which lay the black ribbon of Saint Michael, and a black coat with the red rosette in the buttonhole. This characteristic head, its cold pallor softened by the ivory-yellow tone of old age, was under the full light from a window. At the moment when the postmistress came in, the doctor’s blue eyes, with slightly reddened lids and pathetic lines, were fixed on the altar; new conviction had given them a new expression. His spectacles, laid in his prayerbook, marked the page where he had ceased to read. With his arms folded across his breast, the tall, spare old man, standing in an attitude which proclaimed the full power of all his faculties, and something immovable in his faith, never ceased from gazing at the altar with a humble look, rejuvenescent through hope; not choosing to see his nephew’s wife, who stood rooted almost face to face with him, as if to reproach him for this return to God.
On seeing every face turned to look at her, Zélie hastily retired, and came out on to the Square again less precipitately than she had gone into the church; she had counted on that inheritance, and the inheritance was becoming problematical. She found the registrar, the tax-receiver, and their wives in even greater consternation than before. Goupil had taken pleasure in tormenting them.
“It is not here, on the Square, and under the eyes of the whole town, that we can discuss our private affairs,” said the postmistress; “come to my house. You will not be in the way, Monsieur Dionis,” she added to the lawyer.
So the probable disinheritance of the Massins, the Crémières, and the postmaster was to become the talk of the country.
Just as the heirs and the notary were about to cross the Square on their way to the house, the clatter of the diligence arriving at top speed made a tremendous noise; it stopped at the coach-office, a few yards
