“To be sure.  I am going home from market, and from your lodgings.”

“From my lodgings?”

“Yes, to invite you to breakfast.  The Abbe Plomb’s housekeeper is to be out this afternoon, so he is coming to take his morning meal with us; and the Father thought it would be a good opportunity to make you acquainted.”

“I am much obliged to him; but I must go home and tell Mother Mesurat, that she may not cook my cutlet.”

“You need not do that, as I have just come from her; not finding you, I left word and told Madame Mesurat.  Are you still satisfied with her?”

“Once upon a time,” said he, laughing, “I had, to manage my house in Paris, one Sieur Rateau, a drunkard of the first class, who turned everything upside down, and led the furniture a life!  Now I have this worthy woman, who sets to work on a different system, but the results are identically the same.  She works by persuasion and gentle means; she does not overthrow the furniture, or bellow as she turns the mattress, or rush at the wall with a broom as if she were charging with fixed bayonet; no, she quietly collects the dust and stirs it round and ends by piling it in little heaps that she hides in the corners of the rooms; she does not rummage the bed, but restricts herself to patting it with the tip of her fingers, stroking the creases out of the sheets, puffing up the pillows and coaxing them out of their hollows.  The man turned everything topsy-turvy; she moves nothing.”

“Well, well; but she is a good woman!”

“Yes, and in spite of it all, I am glad to have her.”

As they talked they had reached the entrance to the Bishop’s residence.  They went through a little gate by the lodge into a large forecourt strewn with small river pebbles, in front of a vast building of the seventeenth century.  There were no flowers of stone-work, no sculpture, no decorative doorways—­nothing but a frontage of shabby brick and stone, a bare, uninviting structure evidently neglected, with tall windows, behind which the shutters could be seen, painted grey.  The entrance was on the level of the first floor; double outside steps led up to the door, and under the landing, in the arch below, there was a glass door, through which, framed in the square, could be seen the trunks of trees beyond.

This courtyard was bordered with tall poplars, which the late Bishop, who had frequented the Tuileries, used to speak of with a smile as his hundred guards.

Madame Bavoil and Durtal crossed this forecourt, sloping to the left towards a wing of the building, roofed with slate.

There, on the first floor, with only a loft above lighted by round dormers, lived the Abbe Gevresin.