This formal rendering of the account was insisted on by the justice of the peace, who feared (unhappily, with too much reason) the results of Doctor Minoret’s death.

The following day the old man was seized with a weakness which compelled him to keep his bed.  In spite of the reserve which always surrounded the doctor’s house and kept it from observation, the news of his approaching death spread through the town, and the heirs began to run hither and thither through the streets, like the pearls of a chaplet when the string is broken.  Massin called at the house to learn the truth, and was told by Ursula herself that the doctor was in bed.  The Nemours doctor had remarked that whenever old Minoret took to his bed he would die; and therefore in spite of the cold, the heirs took their stand in the street, on the square, at their own doorsteps, talking of the event so long looked for, and watching for the moment when the priests should appear, bearing the sacrament, with all the paraphernalia customary in the provinces, to the dying man.  Accordingly, two days later, when the Abbe Chaperon, with an assistant and the choir-boys, preceded by the sacristan bearing the cross, passed along the Grand’Rue, all the heirs joined the procession, to get an entrance to the house and see that nothing was abstracted, and lay their eager hands upon its coveted treasures at the earliest moment.

When the doctor saw, behind the clergy, the row of kneeling heirs, who instead of praying were looking at him with eyes that were brighter than the tapers, he could not restrain a smile.  The abbe turned round, saw them, and continued to say the prayers slowly.  The post master was the first to abandon the kneeling posture; his wife followed him.  Massin, fearing that Zelie and her husband might lay hands on some ornament, joined them in the salon, where all the heirs were presently assembled one by one.

“He is too honest a man to steal extreme unction,” said Cremiere; “we may be sure of his death now.”

“Yes, we shall each get about twenty thousand francs a year,” replied Madame Massin.

“I have an idea,” said Zelie, “that for the last three years he hasn’t invested anything—­he grew fond of hoarding.”

“Perhaps the money is in the cellar,” whispered Massin to Cremiere.

“I hope we shall be able to find it,” said Minoret-Levrault.

“But after what he said at the ball we can’t have any doubt,” cried Madame Massin.

“In any case,” began Cremiere, “how shall we manage?  Shall we divide; shall we go to law; or could we draw lots?  We are adults, you know—­”

A discussion, which soon became angry, now arose as to the method of procedure.  At the end of half an hour a perfect uproar of voices, Zelie’s screeching organ detaching itself from the rest, resounded in the courtyard and even in the street.

The noise reached the doctor’s ears; he heard the words, “The house —­the house is worth thirty thousand francs.  I’ll take it at that,” said, or rather bellowed by Cremiere.