Suddenly every one looks out to the street through the still open door.

A carriage is making its way towards the church; it has a green body and silver lamps.  The old coachman, whose great glove sways the slender scepter of a whip, is so adorned with overlapping capes that he suggests several men on the top of each other.  The black horse is prancing.

“He shines like a piano,” says Benoit.

The Baroness is in the carriage.  The blinds are drawn, so she cannot be seen, but every one salutes the carriage.

“All slaves!” mumbles Brisbille.  “Look at yourselves now, just look!  All the lot of you, as soon as a rich old woman goes by, there you are, poking your noses into the ground, showing your bald heads, and growing humpbacked.”

“She does good,” protests one of the gathering.

“Good?  Ah, yes, indeed!” gurgles the evil man, writhing as though in the grip of some one; “I call it ostentation—­that’s what I call it.”

Shoulders are shrugged, and Monsieur Joseph Boneas, always self-controlled, smiles.

Encouraged by that smile, I say, “There have always been rich people, and there must be.”

“Of course,” trumpets Crillon, “that’s one of the established thoughts that you find in your head when you fish for ’em.  But mark what I says,—­there’s some that dies of envy.  I’m not one of them that dies of envy.”

Monsieur Mielvaque has put his hat back on his petrified head and gone to the door.  Monsieur Joseph Boneas, also, turns his back and goes away.

All at once Crillon cries, “There’s Petrarque!” and darts outside on the track of a big body, which, having seen him, opens its long pair of compasses and escapes obliquely.

“And to think,” says Brisbille, with a horrible grimace, when Crillon has disappeared, “that the scamp is a town councilor!  Ah, by God!”

He foams, as a wave of anger runs through him, swaying on his feet, and gaping at the ground.  Between his fingers there is a shapeless cigarette, damp and shaggy, which he rolls in all directions, patching up and resticking it unceasingly.

Charged with snarls and bristling with shoulder-shrugs, the smith rushes at his fire and pulls the bellows-chain, his yawning shoes making him limp like Vulcan.  At each pull the bellows send spouting from the dust-filled throat of the furnace a cutting blue comet, lined with crackling and dazzling white, and therein the man forges.

Purpling as his agitation rises, nailed to his imprisoning corner, alone of his kind, a rebel against all the immensity of things, the man forges.

* * * * * *

The church bell rang, and we left him there.  When I was leaving I heard Brisbille growl.  No doubt I got my quietus as well.  But what can he have imagined against me?

We meet again, all mixed together in the Place de l’Eglise.  In our part of the town, except for a clan of workers whom one keeps one’s eye on, every one goes to church, men as well as women, as a matter of propriety, out of gratitude to employers or lords of the manor, or by religious conviction.  Two streets open into the Place and two roads, bordered with apple-trees, as well, so that these four ways lead town and country to the Place.