ded by nearly all the bourgeois on the square, to whom
she was apparently relating something. A solicitor, named Sinot, who
numbered all the royalists of Arcis among his clients, and who had not
gone to the Giguet meeting, now detached himself from the group, and
running to the door of the Marion house rang the bell violently.

"What can be the matter?" said Frederic Marest, dropping his eyeglass,
and calling the attention of his colleagues to this circumstance.

"The matter is, messieurs," said the sub-prefect, thinking it useless
to keep a secret which was evidently known to the other party, "that
Charles Keller has been killed in Africa, and that this event doubles
the chances of Simon Giguet. You know Arcis; there can be no other
ministerial candidate than Charles Keller. Any other man would find the
whole local patriotism of the place arrayed against him.

"Will they really elect such an idiot as Simon Giguet?" said Olivier
Vinet, laughing.

This young substitute, then only twenty-three years of age, was the son
of one of our most famous attorney-generals, who had come into power
with the Revolution of July; he therefore owed his early entrance into
public life to the influence of his father. The latter, always elected
deputy by the town of Provins, is one of the buttresses of the Centre
in the Chamber. Therefore the son, whose mother was a Demoiselle de
Chargeboeuf [see "Pierrette"], had a certain air of assurance, both
in his functions and in his personal behavior, that plainly showed
the backing of his father. He expressed his opinion on men and things
without reserve; for he confidently expected not to stay very long
at Arcis, but to receive his appointment as _procureur-du-roi_ at
Versailles, a sure step to a post in Paris.

The confident air of this little Vinet, and the sort of assumption which
the certainty of making his way gave to him, was all the more irritating
to Frederic Marest, his superior, because a biting wit accompanied
the rather undisciplined habits and manners of his young subordinate.
Frederic Marest, _procureur-du-roi_, a man about forty years of age,
who had spent six years of his life under the Restoration in becoming a
substitute only to be neglected and left in Arcis by the government of
July, in spite of the fact that he had some eighteen thousand francs a
year of his own, was perpetually kept on the rack between the
necessity of winning the good graces of young Vinet's father--a to