them to come out of their daily quarrels safe
and sound.

The question of superiority between the two households had been the first
apple of discord; a number of personal quarrels followed to inflame them.
They fought for their colors the whole time; the Bergenheim livery was
red, the Corandeuil green. There were two flags; each exalted his own
while throwing that of his adversaries in the mud. Greenhorn and crab
were jokes; cucumber and lobster were insults.

Such were the gracious terms exchanged every day between the two parties.
In the midst of this civil war, which was carefully concealed from their
masters' eyes, whose severity they feared, lived one rather singular
personage. Leonard Rousselet, Pere Rousselet, as he was generally called,
was an old peasant who, disheartened with life, had made various efforts
to get out of his sphere, but had never succeeded in doing so. Having
been successively hairdresser, sexton, school-teacher, nurse, and
gardener, he had ended, when sixty years old, by falling back to the very
point whence he started. He had no particular employment in M. de
Bergenheim's house; he went on errands, cared for the gardens, and
doctored the mules and horses; he was a tall man, about as much at ease
in his clothing as a dry almond in its shell. A long, dark, yellow coat
usually hung about the calves of his legs, which were covered with long,
blue woollen stockings, and looked more like vine-poles than human legs;
a conformation which furnished daily jokes for the other servants, to
which the old man deigned no response save a disdainful smile, grumbling
through his teeth, "Menials, peasants without education." This latter
speech expressed the late gardener's scorn, for it had been his greatest
grief to pass for an uneducated man; and he had gathered from his various
conditions a singularly dignified and pretentious way of speaking.

In spite of his self-confidence, it was not without some emotion that
Leonard Rousselet responded to this call to appear in the drawing-room
before the person he most feared in the chateau. His bearing showed this
feeling when he presented himself at the drawing-room door, where he
stood as grave and silent as Banquo's ghost. Constance arose at sight of
this fantastic figure, barked furiously and darted toward a pair of legs
for which she seemed to share the irreverence of the liveried servants;
but the texture of the blue stocking and the flesh which covered the
t