serve his legal notices.

Madame Cremiere was a stout woman, with a fair complexion injured by
red blotches, always too tightly laced, intimate with Madame Dionis,
and supposed to be educated because she read novels. Full of
pretensions to wit and elegance, she was awaiting her uncle's money to
"take a certain stand," decorate her salon, and receive the
bourgeoisie. At present her husband denied her Carcel lamps,
lithographs, and all the other trifles the notary's wife possessed.
She was excessively afraid of Goupil, who caught up and retailed her
"slapsus-linquies" as she called them. One day Madame Dionis chanced
to ask what "Eau" she thought best for the teeth.

"Try opium," she replied.

Nearly all the collateral heirs of old Doctor Minoret were now
assembled in the square; the importance of the event which brought
them was so generally felt that even groups of peasants, armed with
their scarlet umbrellas and dressed in those brilliant colors which
make them so picturesque on Sundays and fete-days, stood by, with
their eyes fixed on the frightened heirs. In all little towns which
are midway between large villages and cities those who do not go to
mass stand about in the square or market-place. Business is talked
over. In Nemours the hour of church service was a weekly exchange, to
which the owners of property scattered over a radius of some miles
resorted.

"Well, how would you have prevented it?" said the post master to
Goupil in reply to his remark.