e him.

Like others in the settlement, Shangois was the last of his race. He
could put his finger upon the secret history and private lives of nearly
every person in a dozen parishes, but most of all in Bonaventure--for
such this long parish was called. He knew to a hair's breadth the social
value of every human being in the parish. He was too cunning and acute
to be a gossip, but by direct and indirect ways he made every person
feel that the Cure and the Lord might forgive their pasts, but he could
never forget them, nor wished to do so. For Monsieur Duhamel, the old
seigneur, for the drunken Philippe Casimbault, for the Cure, and for the
Lavilettes, who owned the great farmhouse at the apex of that wedge of
village life, he had a profound respect. The parish generally did not
share his respect for the Lavilettes.

Once upon a time, beyond the memories of any in the parish, the
Lavilettes of Bonaventure were a great people. Disaster came, debt and
difficulty followed, fire consumed the old house in which their dignity
had been cherished, and at last they had no longer their seigneurial
position, but that of ordinary farmers who work and toil in the field
like any of the fifty-acre farmers on the banks of the St. Lawrence
River.

Monsieur Louis Lavilette, the present head of the house, had not
married well. At the time when the feeling against the English was the
strongest, and when his own fortunes were precarious, he had married a
girl somewhat older than himself, who was half English and half French,
her father having been a Hudson's Bay Company factor on the north coast
of the river. In proportion as their fortunes and their popularity
declined, and their once notable position as an old family became scarce
a memory even, the pride of the Lavilettes increased.

Madame Lavilette made strong efforts to secure her place; but she was
not of an old French family, and this was an easy and convenient weapon
against her. Besides, she had no taste, and her manners were much
inferior to those of her husband. What impression he managed to make by
virtue of a good deal of natural dignity, she soon unmade by her lack of
tact. She had no innate breeding, though she was not vulgar. She lacked
sense a little and sensitiveness much.

The Casimbaults and the wife of the old seigneur made no friends of the
Lavilettes, but the old seigneur kept up a formal habit of calling
twice a year at the Lavilettes' big farmhouse, which, in s