Our rival, Beauvisage, is not only a successful stocking-maker and an exemplary mayor, but he is also a model husband, having never tripped in loyalty to his wife, whom he respects and admires.  Every evening, by her orders, he goes to bed before ten o’clock, while Madame Beauvisage and her daughter go into what Arcis is pleased to call society.  But there is no more treacherous water, they say, than still water, just as there was nothing less proper and well-behaved than the calm and peaceable Rosinante on the occasion referred to.

At any rate, while making the tour of his town according to his laudable official habit, Beauvisage from the top of the bridge chanced to catch sight of the fair Parisian who with outstretched arms and gracefully bent body was pursuing her favorite pastime.  A slight movement, the charming impatience with which the pretty fisher twitched her line from the water when the fish had not bitten, was perhaps the electric shock which struck upon the heart of the magistrate, hitherto irreproachable.  No one can say, perhaps, how the thing really came about.  But I ought to remark that during the interregnum that occurred between the making of socks and night-caps and the assumption of municipal duties, Beauvisage himself had practised the art of fishing with a line with distinguished success.  Probably it occurred to him that the poor young lady, having more ardor than science, was not going the right way to work, and the thought of improving her method may have been the real cause of his apparent degeneracy.  However that may be, it is certain that, crossing the bridge in company with her mother, Mademoiselle Beauvisage suddenly cried out, like a true enfant terrible,—­

“Goodness! there’s papa talking with that Parisian woman!”

To assure herself at a glance of the monstrous fact, to rush down the bank and reach her husband (whom she found with laughing lips and the happy air of a browsing sheep), to blast him with a stern “What are you doing here?” to order his retreat to Arcis with the air of a queen, while Mademoiselle Chocardelle, first astonished and then enlightened as to what it all meant, went off into fits of laughter, took scarcely the time I have taken to tell it.  Such, madame, was the proceeding by which Madame Beauvisage, nee Grevin, rescued her husband; and though that proceeding may be called justifiable, it was certainly injudicious, for before night the whole town had heard of the catastrophe, and Beauvisage, arraigned and convicted by common consent of deplorable immorality, saw fresh desertions taking place in the already winnowed phalanx of his partisans.

However, the Gondreville and Grevin side still held firm, and—­would you believe it, madame?—­it was again Mademoiselle Antonia to whom we owe the overthrow of their last rampart.