own. She seems to be a sort of circus woman who never enters a church
except to look at the pictures. She has spent quite a fortune in
decorating Les Touches in a most improper fashion, making it a
Mohammedan paradise where the houris are not women. There is more wine
drunk there, they say, during the few weeks of her stay than the whole
year round in Guerande. The Demoiselles Bougniol let their lodgings
last year to men with beards, who were suspected of being Blues; they
sang wicked songs which made those virtuous women blush and weep, and
spent their time mostly at Les Touches. And this is the woman our dear
Calyste adores! If that creature wanted to-night one of the infamous
books in which the atheists of the present day scoff at holy things,
Calyste would saddle his horse himself and gallop to Nantes for it. I
am not sure that he would do as much for the Church. Moreover, this
Breton woman is not a royalist! If Calyste were again called upon to
strike a blow for the cause, and Mademoiselle des Touches--the Sieur
Camille Maupin, that is her other name, as I have just remembered--if
she wanted to keep him with her the chevalier would let his old father
go to the field without him."

"Oh, no!" said the baroness.

"I should not like to put him to the proof; you would suffer too
much," replied the rector. "All Guerande is turned upside down about
Calyste's passion for this amphibious creature, who is neither man nor
woman, who smokes like an hussar, writes like a journalist, and has at
this very moment in her house the most venomous of all writers,--so
the postmaster says, and he's a /juste-milieu/ man who reads the
papers. They are even talking about her at Nantes. This morning the
Kergarouet cousin who wants to marry Charlotte to a man with sixty
thousand francs a year, went to see Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel, and