“If I had been the old fool’s nephew, he should not have made God my co-heir,” retorted the clerk, with a hideous grin that showed his wide-set and threatening black teeth.
At this moment Massin-Levrault, junior, the justice’s registrar, came up with his wife, and with him was Madame Crémière the tax-receiver’s wife. This man, one of the crudest natives of the little town, had a face like a Tartar, small, round eyes like sloes under a sloping forehead, crinkled hair, an oily skin, large flat ears, a mouth almost without lips, and a thin beard. His manners had the merciless smoothness of the usurer whose dealings are based on fixed principles. He spoke like a man who has lost his voice. To complete the picture, he made his wife and his eldest daughter write out the copies of verdicts.
Madame Crémière was a very fat woman, doubtfully fair, with a thickly freckled complexion; she wore her gowns too tight, was great friends with Madame Dionis, and passed as well informed because she read novels. This lady of finance of the lowest type, full of pretensions to elegance and culture, was awaiting her uncle’s fortune to assume “a certain style,” to decorate her drawing-room, and “receive” her fellow-townsfolk; for her husband refused to allow her clockwork lamps, lithographs, and the trifles she saw in the notary’s wife’s drawing-room. She was excessively afraid of Goupil, who was always on the watch to repeat her capsulingies1—this was her way of saying lapsus linguoe. One day Madame Dionis said to her that she did not know what water to use for her teeth.
“Try gum water,” said she.
By this time most of old Doctor Minoret’s collateral relations had assembled in the Church Square, and the importance of the event which had agitated them was so universally understood, that the groups of peasants, men and women, armed with red umbrellas and clad in the bright hues which make them so picturesque on fête-days as they tramp the roads, all had their eyes turned on the doctor’s presumptive heirs. In those little towns, which hold a middle rank between the larger villages and the great cities, people who do not attend Mass linger on the Square. They discuss business. At Nemours the hour of Mass is also that of a weekly money-market, to which come the residents in the scattered houses from a mile and a half round. This accounts for the mutual understanding of the peasants as against the masters, on the price of produce in relation to labor.
“And how would you have hindered it?” said the master to Goupil.
“I would have made myself as indispensable to him as the air he breathes. But you did not know how to manage him to begin with. An inheritance needs as much looking after as a pretty woman, and for lack of care both may slip through your fingers. If my master’s wife were here, she would tell you how accurate the comparison is,” he added.
“But Monsieur Bongrand has just told me we need not be uneasy,” said the Justice’s registrar.
“Oh! there are several ways of saying that,” replied Goupil, with a laugh. “I should have liked to hear your cunning Justice say that! Why, if there were nothing more to be done; if I, like him—for he lives at your uncle’s—knew that the game was up, I should say with him, ‘Don’t be at all uneasy.’ ”
And as he spoke the words, Goupil smiled in such a comical way, and gave them so plain a meaning, that the inheritors at once suspected the registrar of having been taken in by the Justice’s cunning. The receiver of taxes, a fat little man, as insignificant as a tax collector must be, and as witless as a clever wife could wish, demolished his co-heir Massin with: “Didn’t I tell you so?”
As double dealers always ascribe their own duplicity to others, Massin looked askance at the Justice of the peace, who was at this moment standing near the church with a former client, the Marquis du Rouvre.
“If only I were sure of it!” said he.
“You could nullify the protection he extends to the Marquis du Rouvre, who is within the power of the law, and liable to imprisonment; he is deluging him with advice at this moment,” said Goupil, insinuating an idea of revenge to the registrar. “But draw it mild with your chief; he is very wide awake; he must have some influence over your uncle, and may yet be able to prevent his leaving everything to the Church.”
“Pooh! we shall not die of it,” said Minoret-Levrault, opening his huge snuffbox.
“You will not live by it either,” replied Goupil, making the two women shiver; for they, more rapidly than their husbands, interpreted as privation the loss of the inheritance on which they had counted for comfort. “But we will drown this little grievance in floods of champagne, in honor of Désiré’s return, won’t we, gros père?” he added, tapping the colossus in the stomach, and thus inviting himself for fear of being forgotten.
Before going any further, the precise reader will perhaps be glad to have here a sort of preamble in the form of a pedigree, which indeed is very necessary to define the degrees of relationship in
