him; for, with a recollection of her early days, she attempted to “educate” him, as she called it, whereas he much preferred the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de la Paix.  He frequented the worst company of Soulanges, even down to Bonnebault.  He continued sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry remarked, and replied to all his father’s remonstrances with one perpetual request:  “Send me back to Paris, for I am bored to death here.”

Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was semi-conjugal.  His known passion, in spite of his former liaison with Madame Sarcus, was for the wife of the under-sheriff of the municipal court,—­Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer, who reigned in the second-class society as Madame Soudry did in the first.  Monsieur Plissoud, a competitor of Brunet, belonged to the under-world of Soulanges on account of his wife’s conduct, which it was said he authorized,—­a report that drew upon him the contempt of the leading society.

If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon, the doctor, was its man of science.  The town said of him, “We have here in our midst a scientific man of the first order.”  Madame Soudry (who believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini and Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera) persuaded society, and even Lupin himself, that he might have made his fortune by his voice, and, in like manner, she was always regretting that the doctor did not publish his scientific ideas.

Monsieur Gourdon merely repeated the ideas of Cuvier and Buffon, which might not have enabled him to pose as a scientist before the Soulanges world; but besides this he was making a collection of shells, and he possessed an herbarium, and he knew how to stuff birds.  He lived upon the glory of having bequeathed his cabinet of natural history to the town of Soulanges.  After this was known he was considered throughout the department as a great naturalist and the successor of Buffon.  Like a certain Genevese banker, whose pedantry, coldness, and puritan propriety he copied, without possessing either his money or his shrewdness, Monsieur Gourdon exhibited with great complacency the famous collection, consisting of a bear and a monkey (both of which had died on their way to Soulanges), all the rodents of the department, mice and field-mice and dormice, rats, muskrats, and moles, etc.; all the interesting birds ever shot in Burgundy, and an Alpine eagle caught in the Jura.  Gourdon also possessed a collection of lepidoptera,—­a word which led society to hope for monstrosities, and to say, when it saw them, “Why, they are only butterflies!” Besides these things he had a fine array of fossil shells, mostly the collections of his friends which they bequeathed to him, and all the minerals of Burgundy and the Jura.

These treasures, laid out on shelves with glass doors (the drawers beneath containing the insects), occupied the whole of the first floor of the doctor’s house, and produced a certain effect through the oddity of the names on the tickets, the magic effect of the colors, and the gathering together of so many things which no one pays the slightest attention to when seen in nature, though much admired under glass.  Society took a regular day to go and look at Monsieur Gourdon’s collection.