Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was
semi-conjugal. His known passion, in spite of his former liaison with
Madame Sarcus, was for the wife of the under-sheriff of the municipal
court,--Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer,
who reigned in the second-class society as Madame Soudry did in the
first. Monsieur Plissoud, a competitor of Brunet, belonged to the
under-world of Soulanges on account of his wife's conduct, which it
was said he authorized,--a report that drew upon him the contempt of
the leading society.

If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon,
the doctor, was its man of science. The town said of him, "We have
here in our midst a scientific man of the first order." Madame Soudry
(who believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini
and Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera)
persuaded society, and even Lupin himself, that he might have made his
fortune by his voice, and, in like manner, she was always regretting
that the doctor did not publish his scientific ideas.

Monsieur Gourdon merely repeated the ideas of Cuvier and Buffon, which
might not have enabled him to pose as a scientist before the Soulanges
world; but besides this he was making a collection of shells, and he
possessed an herbarium, and he knew how to stuff birds. He lived upon
the glory of having bequeathed his cabinet of natural history to the
town of Soulanges. After this was known he was considered throughout
the department as a great naturalist and the successor of Buffon. Like
a certain Genevese banker, whose pedantry, coldness, and puritan
propriety he copied, without possessing either his money or his
shrewdness, Monsieur Gourdon exhibited with great complacency the
famous collection, consisting of a bear and a monkey (both of which