These varied talents had drawn upon him the hostility of all the other teachers and public servants of the community, especially that of the mayor’s clerk, and the clerks of the bank and great institutions of Sauveterre.  But all these enemies he had gradually conquered by the unmistakable superiority of his ability; so that they fell in with the universal habit, and, when any thing special happened, said to each other,—­

“Let us go and consult Mechinet.”

He himself concealed, under an appearance of imperturbable good nature, the ambition by which he was devoured:  he wanted to become rich, and to rise in the world.  In fact, Mechinet was a diplomat, working in secret, but as cunning as Talleyrand.  He had succeeded already in making himself the one great personage of Sauveterre.  The town was full of him; nothing was done without him; and yet he had not an enemy in the place.

The fact is, people were afraid of him, and dreaded his terrible tongue.  Not that he had ever injured anybody, he was too wise for that; but they knew the harm he might do, if he chose, as he was master of every important secret in Sauveterre, and the best informed man in town as regarded all their little intrigues, their private foibles, and their dark antecedents.

This gave him quite an exceptional position.  As he was unmarried, he lived with his sisters, the Misses Mechinet, who were the best dressmakers in town, and, moreover, devout members of all kinds of religious societies.  Through them he heard all that was going on in society, and was able to compare the current gossip with what he heard in court, or at the newspaper office.  Thus he could say pleasantly,—­

“How could any thing escape me, when I have the church and the press, the court and the theatre, to keep me informed?”

Such a man would have considered himself disgraced if he had not known every detail of M. de Boiscoran’s private affairs.  He did not hesitate, therefore, while the carriage was rolling along on an excellent road, in the fresh spring morning, to explain to his companions the “case,” as he called it, of the accused nobleman.

M. de Boiscoran, called Jacques by his friends, was rarely on his estate, and then only staid a month or so there.  He was living in Paris, where his family owned a comfortable house in University Street.  His parents were still alive.

His father, the Marquis de Boiscoran, the owner of a large landed estate, a deputy under Louis Philippe, a representative in 1848, had withdrawn from public life when the Second Empire was established, and spent, since that time, all his money, and all his energies, in collecting rare old books, and especially costly porcelain, on which he had written a monograph.