usiness to learn at
least something of what was going on, and also to pay their court to the
mistress of the house.

After this preliminary talk they played at boston, the only game the
queen understood. When the fat old Guerbet had mimicked Madame Isaure,
Gaubertin's wife, laughed at her languishing airs, imitated her thin
voice, her pinched mouth, and her juvenile ways; when the Abbe Taupin
had related one of the tales of his repertory; when Lupin had told of
some event at Ville-aux-Fayes, and Madame Soudry had been deluged with
compliments ad nauseum, the company would say: "We have had a charming
game of boston."

Too self-indulgent to be at the trouble of driving over to the Soudrys'
merely to hear the vapid talk of its visitors and to see a Parisian
monkey in the guise of an old woman, Rigou, far superior in intelligence
and education to this petty society, never made his appearance unless
business brought him over to meet the notary. He excused himself from
visiting on the ground of his occupations, his habits, and his health,
which latter did not allow him, he said, to return at night along a road
which led by the foggy banks of the Thune.

The tall, stiff usurer always had an imposing effect upon Madame
Soudry's company, who instinctively recognized in his nature the cruelty
of the tiger with steel claws, the craft of a savage, the wisdom of
one born in a cloister and ripened by the sun of gold,--a man to whom
Gaubertin had never yet been willing to fully commit himself.

The moment the little green carriole and the bay horse passed the Cafe
de la Paix, Urbain, Soudry's man-servant, who was seated on a
bench under the dining-room windows, and was gossipping with the
tavern-keeper, shades his eyes with his hand to see who was coming.

"It's Pere Rigou," he said. "I must go round and open the door. Take his
horse, Socquard." And Urbain, a former trooper, who could not get into
the gendarmerie and had therefore taken service with Soudry, went round
the house to open the gates of the courtyard.

Socquard, a famous personage throughout the valley, was treated, as
you see, with very little ceremony by the valet. But so it is with many
illustrious people who are so kind as to walk and to sneeze and to sleep
and to eat precisely like common mortals.

Socquard, born a Hercules, could carry a weight of eleven hundred
pounds; a blow of his fist applied on a man's back would break the
vertebral column in two; he co