s with a jest; it degrades nobility of soul by
ridicule; it jeers at sons who mourn their fathers, anathematizes those
who do not mourn them enough, and finds diversion (the hypocrite!) in
weighing the dead bodies before they are cold.

The evening of the day on which Madame Claes died, her friends cast a
few flowers upon her memory in the intervals of their games of whist,
doing homage to her noble qualities as they sorted their hearts and
spades. Then, after a few lachrymal phrases,--the fi, fo, fum of
collective grief, uttered in precisely the same tone, and with
neither more nor less of feeling, at all hours and in every town in
France,--they proceeded to estimate the value of her property. Pierquin
was the first to observe that the death of this excellent woman was
a mercy, for her husband had made her unhappy; and it was even more
fortunate for her children: she was unable while living to refuse her
money to the husband she adored; but now that she was dead, Claes was
debarred from touching it. Thereupon all present calculated the fortune
of that poor Madame Claes, wondered how much she had laid by (had she,
in fact, laid by anything?), made an inventory of her jewels, rummaged
in her wardrobe, peeped into her drawers, while the afflicted family
were still weeping and praying around her death-bed.

Pierquin, with an appraising eye, stated that Madame Claes's possessions
in her own right--to use the notarial phrase--might still be recovered,
and ought to amount to nearly a million and a half of francs; basing
this estimate partly on the forest of Waignies,--whose timber, counting
the full-grown trees, the saplings, the primeval growths, and the recent
plantations, had immensely increased in value during the last twelve
years,--and partly on Balthazar's own property, of which enough remained
to "cover" the claims of his children, if the liquidation of their
mother's fortune did not yield sufficient to release him. Mademoiselle
Claes was still, in Pierquin's slang, "a four-hundred-thousand-franc
girl." "But," he added, "if she doesn't marry,--a step which would
of course separate her interests and permit us to sell the forest and
auction, and so realize the property of the minor children and reinvest
it where the father can't lay hands on it,--Claes is likely to ruin them
all."

Thereupon, everybody looked about for some eligible young man worthy to
win the hand of Mademoiselle Claes; but none of them paid the lawy