affectionate, serious, and attentive, and often slightly melancholy. This
sadness was his only disadvantage, for his manners, being naturally
refined, did not suffer by comparison with the ridiculous pretensions of M.
Girandeau, a traveling clerk, or with the boisterous eccentricities of
Cabrion, an artist, though Girandeau, by his excessive loquacity, and the
painter, by his no less excessive hilarity, had the advantage of Germain,
whose gentlemanly gravity rather awed his lively neighbor.

Rigolette had never evinced any partiality for either of her three lovers;
but, with excellent judgment, she soon discovered that Germain combined all
the qualities which would render any reasonable woman happy.

When the latter was imprisoned, her feeling manifested itself as love.




CHAPTER IV.

PIQUE-VINAIGRE.


The prisoner who was placed alongside of Barbillon in the visitor's room,
was a man about forty years of age, and of slender make, and with a
cunning, intelligent, jovial, and jeering face; he had an enormous mouth,
almost entirely without teeth; when he spoke he twisted it from side to
side, according to the pretty general custom of those who address the
populace of market places; his nose was flat, his head immensely large, and
almost entirely bald; he wore an old gray waistcoat, trousers of an
indescribable color, pieced in a thousand different places; his naked feet,