This affair between Michu and the farmer made a great noise in the arrondissement and darkened the already mysterious shadows which seemed to veil him.  Nor was it the only circumstance which made him feared.  A few months after this scene the citizen Marion, present owner of the Gondreville estate, came to inspect it with the citizen Malin.  Rumor said that Marion was about to sell the property to his companion, who had profited by political events and had just been appointed on the Council of State by the First Consul, in return for his services on the 18th Brumaire.  The shrewd heads of the little town of Arcis now perceived that Marion had been the agent of Malin in the purchase of the property, and not of the brothers Simeuse, as was first supposed.  The all-powerful Councillor of State was the most important personage in Arcis.  He had obtained for one of his political friends the prefecture of Troyes, and for a farmer at Gondreville the exemption of his son from the draft; in fact, he had done services to many.  Consequently, the sale met with no opposition in the neighborhood where Malin then reigned, and where he still reigns supreme.

The Empire was just dawning.  Those who in these days read the histories of the French Revolution can form no conception of the vast spaces which public thought traversed between events which now seem to have been so near together.  The strong need of peace and tranquillity which every one felt after the violent tumults of the Revolution brought about a complete forgetfulness of important anterior facts.  History matured rapidly under the advance of new and eager interests.  No one, therefore, except Michu, looked into the past of this affair, which the community accepted as a simple matter.  Marion, who had bought Gondreville for six hundred thousand francs in assignats, sold it for the value of a couple of million in coin; but the only payments actually made by Malin were for the costs of registration.  Grevin, a seminary comrade of Malin, assisted the transaction, and the Councillor rewarded his help with the office of notary at Arcis.  When the news of the sale reached the pavilion, brought there by a farmer whose farm, at Grouage, was situated between the forest and the park on the left of the noble avenue, Michu turned pale and left the house.  He lay in wait for Marion, and finally met him alone in one of the shrubberies of the park.

“Is monsieur about to sell Gondreville?” asked the bailiff.

“Yes, Michu, yes.  You will have a man of powerful influence for your master.  He is the friend of the First Consul, and very intimate with all the ministers; he will protect you.”

“Then you were holding the estate for him?”

“I don’t say that,” replied Marion.  “At the time I bought it I was looking for a place to put my money, and I invested in national property as the best security.  But it doesn’t suit me to keep an estate once belonging to a family in which my father was—­”