worn low-necked; but a tulle fichu, carefully drawn down by hidden strings, covered her neck and shoulders, though it opened a little in front, where its folds were caught together with a sevigne.  Beneath this delicate fabric Bathilde’s beauties seemed all the more enticing and coquettish.  She took off her velvet bonnet and her shawl on arriving, and showed her pretty ears adorned with what were then called “ear-drops” in gold.  She wore a little jeannette—­a black velvet ribbon with a heart attached—­round her throat, where it shone like the jet ring which fantastic nature had fastened round the tail of a white angora cat.  She knew all the little tricks of a girl who seeks to marry; her fingers arranged her curls which were not in the least out of order; she entreated Rogron to fasten a cuff-button, thus showing him her wrist, a request which that dazzled fool rudely refused, hiding his emotions under the mask of indifference.  The timidity of the only love he was ever to feel in the whole course of his life took an external appearance of dislike.  Sylvie and her friend Celeste Habert were deceived by it; not so Vinet, the wise head of this doltish circle, among whom no one really coped with him but the priest,—­the colonel being for a long time his ally.

On the other hand the colonel was behaving to Sylvie very much as Bathilde behaved to Rogron.  He put on a clean shirt every evening and wore velvet stocks, which set off his martial features and the spotless white of his collar.  He adopted the fashion of white pique waistcoats, and caused to be made for him a new surtout of blue cloth, on which his red rosette glowed finely; all this under pretext of doing honor to the new guests Madame and Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf.  He even refrained from smoking for two hours previous to his appearance in the Rogrons’ salon.  His grizzled hair was brushed in a waving line across a cranium which was ochre in tone.  He assumed the air and manner of a party leader, of a man who was preparing to drive out the enemies of France, the Bourbons, on short, to beat of drum.

The satanic lawyer and the wily colonel played the priest and his sister a more cruel trick than even the importation of the beautiful Madame de Chargeboeuf, who was considered by all the Liberal party and by Madame de Breautey and her aristocratic circle to be far handsomer than Madame Tiphaine.  These two great statesmen of the little provincial town made everybody believe that the priest was in sympathy with their ideas; so that before long Provins began to talk of him as a liberal ecclesiastic.  As soon as this news reached the bishop Monsieur Habert was sent for and admonished to cease his visits to the Rogrons; but his sister continued to go there.  Thus the salon Rogron became a fixed fact and a constituted power.