keeper of notes (making fun of his calling in order to seem above it),
--the tabellion was on terms of spoken gallantry with Madame Soudry,
who had a weakness for Lupin, though he was blond and wore spectacles.
Hitherto the late Cochet had loved none but dark men, with moustachios
and hairy hands, of the Alcides type. But she made an exception in
favor of Lupin on account of his elegance, and, moreover, because she
thought her glory at Soulanges was not complete without an adorer;
but, to Soudry's despair, the queen's adorers never carried their
adoration so far as to threaten his rights.

Lupin had married an heiress in wooden shoes and blue woollen
stockings, the only daughter of a salt-dealer, who made his money
during the Revolution,--a period when contraband salt-traders made
enormous profits by reason of the reaction that set in against the
gabelle. He prudently left his wife at home, where Bebelle, as he
called her, was supported under his absence by a platonic passion for
a handsome clerk who had no other means than his salary,--a young man
named Bonnac, belonging to the second-class society, where he played
the same role that his master, the notary, played in the first.

Madame Lupin, a woman without any education whatever, appeared on
great occasions only, under the form of an enormous Burgundian barrel
dressed in velvet and surmounted by a little head sunken in shoulders
of a questionable color. No efforts could retain her waist-belt in its
natural place. "Bebelle" candidly admitted that prudence forbade her
wearing corsets. The imagination of a poet or, better still, that of
an inventor, could not have found on Bebelle's back the slightest
trace of that seductive sinuosity which the vertebrae of all women who
are women usually produce. Bebelle, round as a tortoise, belonged to
the genus of invertebrate females. This alarming development of