nothing but, "that pig of a Morin," and that epithet went through him
like a sword thrust every time he heard it. When a street boy called
after him: "Pig!" he turned his head instinctively. His friends also
overwhelmed him with horrible jokes, and used to ask him, whenever they
were eating ham: "It's a bit of you?" He died two years later.

As for myself, when I was a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in
1875, I called on the new notary at Fouserre, Monsieur Belloncle, to
solicit his vote, and a tall, handsome and evidently wealthy lady
received me. "You do not know me again?" she said. And I stammered out:
"But ... no Madame." "Henriette Bonnel." "Ah!" And I felt myself turning
pale, while she seemed perfectly at her ease, and looked at me with a
smile.

As soon as she had left me alone with her husband, he took both my
hands, and squeezing them as if he meant to crush them, he said: "I have
been intending to go and see you for a long time, my dear sir, for my
wife has very often talked to me about you. I know ... yes, I know under
what painful circumstances you made her acquaintance, and I know also
how perfectly you behaved, how full of delicacy, tact and devotion you
showed yourself in the affair...." He hesitated, and then said in a
lower tone, as if he had been saying something low and coarse.... "In
the affair of that pig of a Morin."




THE WOODEN SHOES