Pere Fourchon, formerly a schoolmaster at Blangy, lost that place through misconduct and his singular ideas as to public education.  He helped the children to make paper boats with their alphabets much oftener than he taught them how to spell; he scolded them in so remarkable a manner for pilfering fruit that his lectures might really have passed for lessons on the best way of scaling the walls.  From teacher he became a postman.  In this capacity, which serves as a refuge to many an old soldier, Pere Fourchon was daily reprimanded.  Sometimes he forgot the letters in a tavern, at other times he kept them in his pocket.  When he was drunk he left those for one village in another village; when he was sober he read them.  Consequently, he was soon dismissed.  No longer able to serve the State, Pere Fourchon ended by becoming a manufacturer.  In the country a poor man can always get something to do, and make at least a pretence of gaining an honest livelihood.  At sixty-eight years of age the old man started his rope-walk, a manufactory which requires the very smallest capital.  The workshop is, as we have seen, any convenient wall; the machinery costs about ten francs.  The apprentice slept, like his master, in a hay-loft, and lived on whatever he could pick up.  The rapacity of the law in the matter of doors and windows expires “sub dio.”  The tow to make the first rope can be borrowed.  But the principal revenue of Pere Fourchon and his satellite Mouche, the natural son of one of his natural daughters, came from the otters; and then there were breakfasts and dinners given them by peasants who could neither read nor write, and were glad to use the old fellow’s talents when they had a bill to make out, or a letter to dispatch.  Besides all this, he knew how to play the clarionet, and he went about with his friend Vermichel, the miller of Soulanges, to village weddings and the grand balls given at the Tivoli of Soulanges.

Vermichel’s name was Michel Vert, but the transposition was so generally used that Brunet, the clerk of the municipal court of Soulanges, was in the habit of writing Michel-Jean-Jerome Vert, called Vermichel, practitioner.  Vermichel, a famous violin in the Burgundian regiment of former days, had procured for Pere Fourchon, in recognition of certain services, a situation as practitioner, which in remote country-places usually devolves on those who are able to sign their name.  Pere Fourchon therefore added to his other avocations that of witness, or practitioner of legal papers, whenever the Sieur Brunet came to draw them in the districts of Cerneux, Conches, and Blangy.  Vermichel and Fourchon, allied by a friendship of twenty years’ tippling, might really be considered a business firm.