ty notary, and keeper
of notes (making fun of his calling in order to seem above it),--the
tabellion was on terms of spoken gallantry with Madame Soudry, who had
a weakness for Lupin, though he was blond and wore spectacles. Hitherto
the late Cochet had loved none but dark men, with moustachios and hairy
hands, of the Alcides type. But she made an exception in favor of Lupin
on account of his elegance, and, moreover, because she thought her
glory at Soulanges was not complete without an adorer; but, to Soudry's
despair, the queen's adorers never carried their adoration so far as to
threaten his rights.

Lupin had married an heiress in wooden shoes and blue woollen stockings,
the only daughter of a salt-dealer, who made his money during the
Revolution,--a period when contraband salt-traders made enormous profits
by reason of the reaction that set in against the gabelle. He prudently
left his wife at home, where Bebelle, as he called her, was supported
under his absence by a platonic passion for a handsome clerk who had no
other means than his salary,--a young man named Bonnac, belonging to the
second-class society, where he played the same role that his master, the
notary, played in the first.

Madame Lupin, a woman without any education whatever, appeared on great
occasions only, under the form of an enormous Burgundian barrel dressed
in velvet and surmounted by a little head sunken in shoulders of a
questionable color. No efforts could retain her waist-belt in its
natural place. "Bebelle" candidly admitted that prudence forbade her
wearing corsets. The imagination of a poet or, better still, that of an
inventor, could not have found on Bebelle's back the slightest trace of
that seductive sinuosity which the vertebrae of all women who are women
usually produce. Bebelle, round as a tortoise, belonged to the genus of
invertebrate females. This alarming development of cellular tissue no
doubt reassured Lupin on the subject of the platonic passion of his fat
wife, whom he boldly called Bebelle without raising a laugh.

"Your wife, what is she?" said Sarcus the rich, one day, when unable to
digest the fatal word "superannuated," applied to a piece of furniture
he had just bought at a bargain.

"My wife is not like yours," replied Lupin; "she is not defined as yet."

Beneath his rosy exterior the notary possessed a subtle mind, and he had
the sense to say nothing about his property, which was fully as large as
that of Ri