“Theft,” said Madame Massin.

“Worse!” cried Minoret-Levrault, exasperated by the tongue of his gossiping neighbour.

“Of course I know,” said Madame Massin, “that the Abbe Chaperon is an honest man; but he is capable of anything for the sake of his poor.  He must have mined and undermined uncle, and the old man has just tumbled into piety.  We did nothing, and here he is perverted!  A man who never believed in anything, and had principles of his own!  Well! we’re done for.  My husband is absolutely beside himself.”

Madame Massin, whose sentences were so many arrows stinging her fat cousin, made him walk as fast as herself, in spite of his obesity and to the great astonishment of the church-goers, who were on their way to mass.  She was determined to overtake this uncle and show him to the post master.

Nemours is commanded on the Gatinais side by a hill, at the foot of which runs the road to Montargis and the Loing.  The church, on the stones of which time has cast a rich discolored mantle (it was rebuilt in the fourteenth century by the Guises, for whom Nemours was raised to a peerage-duchy), stands at the end of the little town close to a great arch which frames it.  For buildings, as for men, position does everything.  Shaded by a few trees, and thrown into relief by a neatly kept square, this solitary church produces a really grandiose effect.  As the post master of Nemours entered the open space, he beheld his uncle with the young girl called Ursula on his arm, both carrying prayer-books and just entering the church.  The old man took off his hat in the porch, and his head, which was white as a hill-top covered with snow, shone among the shadows of the portal.

“Well, Minoret, what do you say to the conversion of your uncle?” cried the tax-collector of Nemours, named Cremiere.

“What do you expect me to say?” replied the post master, offering him a pinch of snuff.

“Well answered, Pere Levrault.  You can’t say what you think, if it is true, as an illustrious author says it is, that a man must think his words before he speaks his thoughts,” cried a young man, standing near, who played the part of Mephistopheles in the little town.

This ill-conditioned youth, named Goupil, was head clerk to Monsieur Cremiere-Dionis, the Nemours notary.  Notwithstanding a past conduct that was almost debauched, Dionis had taken Goupil into his office when a career in Paris—­where the clerk had wasted all the money he inherited from his father, a well-to-do farmer, who educated him for a notary—­was brought to a close by his absolute pauperism.  The mere sight of Goupil told an observer that he had made haste to enjoy life, and had paid dear for his enjoyments.  Though very short, his chest and shoulders were developed at twenty-seven years of age like those of a man of forty.  Legs small and weak, and a broad face, with a cloudy complexion like the sky before a storm, surmounted by a bald forehead,