line of fair
whiskers, which encircling his jaws, framed, after the fashion of a
garden border, his long, wan face, whose eyes were small and the nose
hooked. Clever at all games of cards, a good hunter, and writing a fine
hand, he had at home a lathe, and amused himself by turning
napkin-rings, with which he filled up his house, with the jealousy of an
artist and the egotism of a bourgeois.

He went to the small parlor, but the three millers had to be got out
first, and during the whole time necessary for laying the cloth, Binet
remained silent in his place near the stove. Then he shut the door and
took off his cap in his usual way.

"It isn't with saying civil things that he'll wear out his tongue," said
the chemist, as soon as he was alone with the landlady.

"He never talks more," she replied. "Last week two travelers in the
cloth line were here--such clever chaps, who told such jokes in the
evening, that I fairly cried with laughing; and he stood there like a
dab fish and never said a word."

"Yes," observed the chemist; "no imagination, no sallies, nothing that
makes the society man."

"Yet they say he has parts," objected the landlady.

"Parts!" replied Monsieur Homais; "he parts! In his own line it is
possible," he added in a calmer tone. And he went on--

"Ah! that a merchant, who has large connections, a juris-consult, a
doctor, a chemist, should be thus absent-minded, that they should become
whimsical or even peevish, I can understand; such cases are cited in
history. But at least it is because they are thinking of something.
Myself, for example, how often has it happened to me to look on the
bureau for my pen to write a label, and to find, after all, that I had
put it behind my ear?"

Madame Lefrancois just then went to the door to see if the "Hirondelle"
were not coming. She started. A man dressed in black suddenly came into
the kitchen. By the last gleam of the twilight one could see that his
face was rubicund and his form athletic.

"What can I do for you, Monsieur le Cure?" asked the landlady, as she
reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed with
their candles in a row. "Will you take something? A thimbleful of
_cassis_? A glass of wine?"

The priest declined very politely. He had come for his umbrella, that he
had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after asking
Madame Lefrancois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the
evening, he left for