oughts of religion
crossed a brain so quick to conceive picturesque fancies; he would see
the cure, he would confess and receive the last sacraments. The moan,
uttered in the faint voice by a young man with such a comely face and
figure, went to Mme. Courtois' heart.

"I say, little man, just take the horse and go to Marsac and ask Dr.
Marron to come and see this young man; he is in a very bad way, it
seems to me, and you might bring the cure as well. Perhaps they may
know more about that printer in the Place du Murier than you do, for
Postel married M. Marron's daughter."

Courtois departed. The miller's wife tried to make Lucien take food;
like all country-bred folk, she was full of the idea that sick folk
must be made to eat. He took no notice of her, but gave way to a
violent storm of remorseful grief, a kind of mental process of
counter-irritation, which relieved him.

The Courtois' mill lies a league away from Marsac, the town of the
district, and the half-way between Mansle and Angouleme; so it was not
long before the good miller came back with the doctor and the cure.
Both functionaries had heard rumors coupling Lucien's name with the
name of Mme. de Bargeton; and now when the whole department was
talking of the lady's marriage to the new Prefect and her return to
Angouleme as the Comtesse du Chatelet, both cure and doctor were
consumed with a violent curiosity to know why M. de Bargeton's widow
had not married the young poet with whom she had left Angouleme. And
when they heard, furthermore, that Lucien was at the mill, they were
eager to know whether the poet had come to the rescue of his
brother-in-law. Curiosity and humanity alike prompted them to go at
once to the dying man. Two hours after Courtois set out, Lucien heard
the rattle of old iron over the stony causeway, the country doctor's
ramshackle chaise came up to the door, and out stepped MM. Marron, for
the cure was the doctor's uncle. Lucien's bedside visitors were as
intimate with David's father as country neighbors usually are in a
small vine-growing township. The doctor looked at the dying man, felt
his pulse, and examined his tongue; then he looked at the miller's
wife, and smiled reassuringly.

"Mme. Courtois," said he, "if, as I do not doubt, you have a bottle of
good wine somewhere in the cellar, and a fat eel in your fish-pond,
put them before your patient, it is only exhaustion; there is nothing
the matter with him. Our great man will be