uncle make a note of the engagement.



Next evening at nine Bianchon mounted his uncle's dusty staircase, and
found him at work on the statement of some complicated judgment. The
coat Lavienne had ordered of the tailor had not been sent, so Popinot
put on his old stained coat, and was the Popinot unadorned whose
appearance made those laugh who did not know the secrets of his
private life. Bianchon, however, obtained permission to pull his
cravat straight, and to button his coat, and he hid the stains by
crossing the breast of it with the right side over the left, and so
displaying the new front of the cloth. But in a minute the judge
rucked the coat up over his chest by the way in which he stuffed his
hands into his pockets, obeying an irresistible habit. Thus the coat,
deeply wrinkled both in front and behind, made a sort of hump in the
middle of the back, leaving a gap between the waistcoat and trousers
through which his shirt showed. Bianchon, to his sorrow, only
discovered this crowning absurdity at the moment when his uncle
entered the Marquise's room.

A brief sketch of the person and the career of the lady in whose
presence the doctor and the judge now found themselves is necessary
for an understanding of her interview with Popinot.

Madame d'Espard had, for the last seven years, been very much the
fashion in Paris, where Fashion can raise and drop by turns various
personages who, now great and now small, that is to say, in view or
forgotten, are at last quite intolerable--as discarded ministers are,
and every kind of decayed sovereignty. These flatterers of the past,