Montcornet might have dismissed his steward under pretext of paying off a military obligation by putting some old soldier in his place; Gaubertin and the general would have understood the matter, and the latter, by sparing the steward’s self-love would have given him a chance to withdraw quietly.  Gaubertin, in that case, would have left his late employer in peace, and possibly he might have taken himself and his savings to Paris for investment.  But being, as he was, ignominiously dismissed, the man conceived against his late master one of those bitter hatreds which are literally a part of existence in provincial life, the persistency, duration, and plots of which would astonish diplomatists who are trained to let nothing astonish them.  A burning desire for vengeance led him to settle at Ville-aux-Fayes, and to take a position where he could injure Montcornet and stir up sufficient enmity against to force him to sell Les Aigues.

The general was deceived by appearances; for Gaubertin’s external behavior was not of a nature to warn or to alarm him.  The late steward followed his old custom of pretending, not exactly poverty, but limited means.  For years he had talked of his wife and three children, and the heavy expenses of a large family.  Mademoiselle Laguerre, to whom he had declared himself too poor to educate his son in Paris, paid the costs herself, and allowed her dear godson (for she was Claude Gaubertin’s sponsor) two thousand francs a year.

The day after the quarrel, Gaubertin came, with a keeper named Courtecuisse, and demanded with much insolence his release in full of all claims, showing the general the one he had obtained from his late mistress in such flattering terms, and asking, ironically, that a search should be made for the property, real and otherwise, which he was supposed to have stolen.  If he had received fees from the wood-merchants on their purchases and from the farmers on their leases, Mademoiselle Laguerre, he said, had always allowed it; not only did she gain by the bargains he made, but everything went on smoothly without troubling her.  The country-people would have died, he remarked, for Mademoiselle, whereas the general was laying up for himself a store of difficulties.

Gaubertin—­and this trait is frequently to be seen in the majority of those professions in which the property of others can be taken by means not foreseen by the Code—­considered himself a perfectly honest man.  In the first place, he had so long had possession of the money extorted from Mademoiselle Laguerre’s farmers through fear, and paid in assignats, that he regarded it as legitimately acquired.  It was a mere matter of exchange.  He thought that in the end he should have quite as much risk with coin as with paper.  Besides, legally, Mademoiselle had no right to receive any payment except in assignats.  “Legally” is a fine, robust adverb, which bolsters up many a fortune!  Moreover, he reflected that ever since great estates and land-agents had existed, that is, ever since the origin of society, the said agents had set up, for their own use, an argument such as we find our cooks using in this present day.  Here it is, in its simplicity:—­