“It is robbery!” said Madame Massin.
“It is worse!” cried Minoret-Levrault, exasperated by his voluble cousin’s remark.
“I know,” she went on, “that the Abbé Chaperon, though he is a priest, is an honest man. But he is capable of anything for the poor. He must have mined, mined, mined under Uncle Minoret, and the doctor has fallen into bigotry. We were easy in our minds, and now he is perverted. A man who never believed in anything, and who had principles! Oh, we are all done for! My husband is dreadfully upset.”
Madame Massin, whose speeches were so many arrows that stung her stout cousin, made him walk as briskly as herself in spite of his size, to the great amazement of the people who were going to Mass. She wanted to catch up this Uncle Minoret and show him to the postmaster.
On the Gatinais side of Nemours the town is commanded by a hill, along the base of which the river Loing flows, and the road runs to Montargis. The church, on which time has cast a rich mantle of gray, for it was certainly rebuilt in the fourteenth century by the Guises, in whose honor Nemours gave its name to a duchy and peerage, stands at the end of the town beyond a large archway, as in a frame. For buildings, as for men, position is everything. Shaded by trees and shown to advantage by a neat little square, this lonely church has a quite imposing effect. As they came out on to the square, the postmaster could see his uncle giving his arm to the young girl they had called Ursule, each carrying a prayerbook, and just entering the church. The old man took off his hat in the porch, and his perfectly white head, like a summit covered with snow, shone in the soft gloom of the great doorway.
“Well, Minoret, what do you say to your uncle’s conversion?” cried the tax-receiver of Nemours, whose name was Crémière.
“What do you expect me to say?” replied the postmaster, offering him a pinch of snuff.
“Well answered, Father Levrault. You cannot say what you think, if a certain learned writer was correct in saying that a man must necessarily think his words before he can speak his thought,” mischievously exclaimed a young man who had just come up, and who played in Nemours the part of Mephistopheles in “Faust.”
This rascally fellow, named Goupil, was head clerk to Monsieur Crémière-Dionis, the notary of the town. Notwithstanding the antecedents of an almost crapulous career, Dionis had taken Goupil into his office when absolute destitution hindered him from remaining any longer at Paris, where the clerk had spent all the money left him by his father, a well-to-do farmer, who meant him to become a notary. Only to see Goupil was enough to tell you that he had made haste to enjoy life; for, to procure himself pleasure, he must have paid dearly for it. Though very short, the clerk, at seven-and-twenty, had a form as burly as that of any man of forty. Short, thin legs, a broad face with a mottled, muddy skin, like the sky before a storm, and a bald forehead, gave emphasis to this strange figure. His face looked as if it belonged to a hunchback, whose hump was an internal deformity. A peculiarity of this sour, pale face confirmed the notion of this invisible malformation. His nose, hooked and twisted, as is often the case with hunchbacks, had a crossway slope from right to left, instead of dividing the face down the middle. His mouth, pinched at the corners—the sardonic mouth—was always eager for irony. His thin, reddish hair fell in dank locks, showing the head through here and there. His great hands and clumsy wrists, at the end of overlong arms, were like talons, and very seldom clean. Goupil wore shoes only fit to be thrown into the dust-heap, and rusty-black, spun-silk stockings; his black coat and trousers, rubbed perfectly threadbare, and almost greasy with dirt; his abject waistcoats, with buttons from which the mould had slipped out; the old bandana he wore as a cravat—every part of his dress proclaimed the cynical misery to which his passions condemned him.
This aggregate of sinister details was completed by a pair of goat’s eyes, the iris set in yellow rings, at once lascivious and cowardly. No man in Nemours was more feared or more respectfully treated than Goupil. Strong in pretensions which his ugliness allowed, he had the detestable wit that is peculiar to persons who take every liberty, and he made use of it to be revenged for the mortifications of his permanent jealousy. He rhymed satirical couplets such as are sung at the Carnival, he got up farcical demonstrations, and himself wrote almost the whole of the local newspaper gossip. Dionis, a keen, false nature, and therefore a timid one, kept Goupil as much out of fear as on account of his intelligence and his thorough knowledge of family interests in the neighborhood. But the master so little trusted the clerk that he managed his accounts himself, did not allow him to lodge at his house, and never employed him on any confidential or delicate business. The clerk flattered his master, never showing the resentment he felt at this conduct; and he watched Madame Dionis with an eye to revenge. He had a quick intelligence, and worked well and easily.
“Oh you! You are laughing already at our misfortunes,” said the postmaster to the clerk, who was rubbing his hands.
As Goupil basely flattered every passion of Désiré’s, who for the last five years had made him his companion, the postmaster treated him cavalierly enough, never suspecting what a horrible store of evil feeling was accumulating at the bottom of Goupil’s heart at each fresh
