“Oh, if Monsieur Garceland has got one we will have it!” said Mademoiselle Svlvie. “It must be right; he had good taste.”
“Sylvie, he suggests we should have ovolos in the cornice of the passage.”
“You call that an ovolo?”
“Yes, mademoiselle.”
“But why? What a queer name! I never heard it before.”
“But you have seen them?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know Latin?”
“No.”
“Well, it means egg-shaped; the ovolo is egg-shaped.”
“You are a queer crew, you architects!” cried Rogron. “That, no doubt, is the reason you charge so much; you don’t throw away your eggshells!”
“Shall we paint the passage?” asked the builder.
“Certainly not!” cried Sylvie. “Another five hundred francs!”
“But the drawing-room and the stairs are so nice, it is a pity not to decorate the passage,” said the builder. “Little Madame Lesourd had hers painted last year.”
“And yet her husband, being crown prosecutor, cannot stay at Provins—”
“Oh! he will be President of the Courts here some day,” said the builder.
“And what do you think is to become of Monsieur Tiphaine then?”
“Monsieur Tiphaine! He has a pretty wife; I am not uneasy about him. Monsieur Tiphaine will go to Paris.”
“Shall we paint the corridor?”
“Yes; the Lesourds will, at any rate, see that we are as good as they are,” said Rogron.
The first year of their residence in Provins was wholly given up to these discussions, to the pleasure of seeing the workmen busy, to the surprises and information of all kinds that they got by it, and to the attempts made by the brother and sister to scrape acquaintance with the most important families in the town.
The Rogrons had never had any kind of society; they had never gone out of their shop; they knew literally no one in Paris, and they thirsted for the pleasure of visiting. On their return they found first Monsieur and Madame Julliard, of the Ver chinois, with their children and grandchildren; then the Guépin family, or, to be exact, the Guépin clan; the grandson still kept the shop of the Trois Quenouilles; and finally, Madame Guenée, who had sold them the business of the Sceur de famille; her three daughters were married in Provins. These three great tribes—the Julliards, the Guépins, and the Guenées—spread over the town like couch-grass on a lawn. Monsieur Garceland, the Maire, was Monsieur Guépin’s son-in-law. The Curé, Monsieur l’Abbé Péroux, was own brother to Madame Julliard, who was a Péroux. The President of the Court, Monsieur Tiphaine, was brother to Madame Guenée, who signed herself “née Tiphaine.”
The queen of the town was Madame Tiphaine junior, the handsome only daughter of Madame Roguin, who was the wealthy wife of a notary of Paris; but he was never mentioned. Delicate, pretty, and clever, married to a provincial husband by the express management of her mother, who would not have her with her, and had taken her from school only a few days before her marriage, Mélanie felt herself an exile at Provins, where she behaved admirably well. She was already rich, and had great expectations. As to Monsieur Tiphaine, his old father had advanced his eldest daughter, Madame Guenée, so much money on account of her share of the property, that an estate worth eight thousand francs a year, at about five leagues from Provins, would fall to the President. Thus the Tiphaines, who had married on twenty thousand francs a year, exclusive of the President’s salary and residence, expected some day to have twenty thousand francs a year more. They were not out of luck, people said.
Madame Tiphaine’s great and only object in life was to secure her husband’s election as deputy. Once in Paris, the deputy would be made judge, and from the Lower Court she promised herself he should soon be promoted to the High Court of Justice. Hence she humored everybody’s vanity, and strove to please; more difficult still, she succeeded. The young woman of two-and-twenty received twice a week, in her handsome house in the old town, all the citizen class of Provins. She had not yet taken a single awkward step on the slippery ground where she stood. She gratified every conceit, patted every hobby; grave with serious folks, and a girl with girls, of all things a mother with the mothers, cheerful with the young wives, eager to oblige, polite to all; in short, a pearl, a gem, the pride of Provins. She had not yet said the word, but all the electors of the town awaited the day when their dear President should be old enough, to nominate him at once. Every voter, sure of his talents, made him his man and his patron. Oh yes, Monsieur Tiphaine would get on; he would be Keeper of the Seals, and he would promote the interests of Provins.
These were the means by which Madame Tiphaine had been so fortunate as to obtain her ascendency over the little town of Provins. Madame Guenée, Monsieur Tiphaine’s sister, after seeing her three daughters married—the eldest to Monsieur Lesourd the public prosecutor, the second to Monsieur Martener the doctor, and the third to Monsieur Auffray the notary—had herself married again Monsieur Galardon, the collector of taxes. Mesdames Lesourd, Martener, and Auffray, and their mother Madame Galardon, regarded the President as the wealthiest and cleverest man in the family. The public prosecutor, Monsieur Tiphaine’s nephew by marriage, had the greatest interest in getting his uncle to Paris, so as to be made President himself. Hence these four ladies—for Madame Galardon adored her brother—formed a little court about Madame Tiphaine, taking her opinion and advice on every subject.
Then Monsieur Julliard’s eldest son, married to the only daughter of a rich farmer, was taken with a sudden passion, a grande passion, secret and disinterested, for the President’s wife—that angel dropped from the sky of Paris. Mélanie, very wily, incapable of burdening herself with a Julliard, but
