"You!" exclaimed the post master to the clerk, who stood rubbing his
hands, "making game of our misfortunes already?"

As Goupil was known to have pandered to Dionis' passions for the last
five years, the post master treated him cavalierly, without suspecting
the hoard of ill-feeling he was piling up in Goupil's heart with every
fresh insult. The clerk, convinced that money was more necessary to
him than it was to others, and knowing himself superior in mind to the
whole bourgeoisie of Nemours, was now counting on his intimacy with
Minoret's son Desire to obtain the means of buying one or the other of
three town offices,--that of clerk of the court, or the legal practice
of one of the sheriffs, or that of Dionis himself. For this reason he
put up with the affronts of the post master and the contempt of Madame
Minoret-Levrault, and played a contemptible part towards Desire,
consoling the fair victims whom that youth left behind him after each
vacation,--devouring the crumbs of the loaves he had kneaded.

"If I were the nephew of a rich old fellow, he never would have given
God to ME for a co-heir," retorted Goupil, with a hideous grin which
exhibited his teeth--few, black, and menacing.

Just then Massin-Levrault, junior, the clerk of the court, joined his
wife, bringing with him Madame Cremiere, the wife of the tax-collector
of Nemours. This man, one of the hardest natures of the little town,
had the physical characteristics of a Tartar: eyes small and round as
sloes beneath a retreating brow, crimped hair, an oily skin, huge ears
without any rim, a mouth almost without lips, and a scanty beard. He
spoke like a man who was losing his voice. To exhibit him thoroughly
it is enough to say that he employed his wife and eldest daughter to