of this inflexibility was in 1620,
when he gained a lawsuit against a priest named Meunier. He caused
the sentence to be carried out with such rigour that he awoke an
inextinguishable hatred in Meunier's mind, which ever after burst forth
on the slightest provocation.

A second lawsuit, which he likewise gained; was one which he undertook
against the chapter of Sainte-Croix with regard to a house, his claim
to which the chapter, disputed. Here again he displayed the same
determination to exact his strict legal rights to the last iota, and
unfortunately Mignon, the attorney of the unsuccessful chapter, was
a revengeful, vindictive, and ambitious man; too commonplace ever to
arrive at a high position, and yet too much above his surroundings to be
content with the secondary position which he occupied. This man, who
was a canon of the collegiate church of Sainte-Croix and director of the
Ursuline convent, will have an important part to play in the following
narrative. Being as hypocritical as Urbain was straightforward, his
ambition was to gain wherever his name was known a reputation for
exalted piety; he therefore affected in his life the asceticism of an
anchorite and the self-denial of a saint. As he had much experience in
ecclesiastical lawsuits, he looked on the chapter's loss of this one,
of which he had in some sort guaranteed the success, as a personal
humiliation, so that when Urbain gave himself airs of triumph and
exacted the last letter of his bond, as in the case of Meunier, he
turned Mignon into an enemy who was not only more relentless but more
dangerous than the former.

In the meantime, and in consequence of this lawsuit, a certain Barot, an
uncle of Mignon and his partner as well, got up a dispute with Urbain,
but as he was a man below mediocrity, Urbain required in order to crush
him only to let fall from the height of his superiority a few of those
disdainful words which brand as deeply as a red-hot iron. This man,
though totally wanting in parts, was very rich, and having no children
was always surrounded by a horde of relatives, every one of whom was
absorbed in the attempt to make himself so agreeable that his name would
appear in Barot's will. This being so, the mocking words which were
rained down on Barot spattered not only himself but also all those who
had sided with him in the quarrel, and thus added considerably to the
tale of Urbain's enemies.

About this epoch a still graver event took p