Courtecuisse clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and set
his glass on the table.

"Vatel put himself in the wrong," he said. "If I were Mother Tonsard,
I'd give myself a few wounds and go to bed and say I was ill, and have
that Shopman and his keeper up before the assizes and get twenty
crowns damages. Monsieur Sarcus would give them."

"In any case the Shopman would give them to stop the talk it would
make," said Godain.

Vaudoyer, the former field-keeper, a man five feet six inches tall,
with a face pitted with the small-pox and furrowed like a nut-cracker,
kept silence with a hesitating air.

"Well, you old ninny, does that ruffle you?" asked Tonsard, attracted
by the idea of damages. "If they had broken twenty crowns' worth of my
mother's bones we could turn it into good account; we might make a
fine fuss for three hundred francs; Monsieur Gourdon would go to Les
Aigues and tell them that the mother had got a broken hip--"

"And break it, too," interrupted Madame Tonsard; "they do that in
Paris."

"It would cost too much," remarked Godain.

"I have been too long among the people who rule us to believe that
matters will go as you want them," said Vaudoyer at last, remembering
his past official intercourse with the courts and the gendarmerie. "If