M. de Chandore looked at once for his hat, and said,—­

“To be sure!  He is a friend of ours; and, if any one is well informed, he is.  Let us go to him.  Come.”

M. Seneschal was indeed a friend of the Chandores, the Lavarandes, and also of the Boiscorans.  Although he was a lawyer he had become attached to the people whose confidential adviser he had been for more than twenty years.  Even after having retired from business, M. Seneschal had still retained the full confidence of his former clients.  They never decided on any grave question, without consulting him first.  His successor did the business for them; but M. Seneschal directed what was to be done.

Nor was the assistance all on one side.  The example of great people like M. de Chandore and Jacques’s uncle had brought many a peasant on business into M. Seneschal’s office; and when he was, at a later period of his life, attacked by the fever of political ambition, and offered to “sacrifice himself for his country” by becoming mayor of Sauveterre, and a member of the general council, their support had been of great service to him.

Hence he was well-nigh overcome when he returned, on that fatal morning, to Sauveterre.  He looked so pale and undone, that his wife was seriously troubled.

“Great God, Augustus!  What has happened?” she asked.

“Something terrible has happened,” he replied in so tragic a manner, that his wife began to tremble.

To be sure, Mrs. Seneschal trembled very easily.  She was a woman of forty-five or fifty years, very dark, short, and fat, trying hard to breathe in the corsets which were specially made for her by the Misses Mechinet, the clerk’s sisters.  When she was young, she had been rather pretty:  now she still kept the red cheeks of her younger days, a forest of jet black hair, and excellent teeth.  But she was not happy.  Her life had been spent in wishing for children, and she had none.

She consoled herself, it is true, by constantly referring to all the most delicate details on the subject, mentioning not to her intimate friends only, but to any one who would listen, her constant disappointments, the physicians she had consulted, the pilgrimages she had undertaken, and the quantities of fish she had eaten, although she abominated fish.  All had been in vain, and as her hopes fled with her years, she had become resigned, and indulged now in a kind of romantic sentimentality, which she carefully kept alive by reading novels and poems without end.  She had a tear ready for every unfortunate being, and some words of comfort for every grief.  Her charity was well known.  Never had a poor woman with children appealed to her in vain.  In spite of all that, she was not easily taken in.  She managed her household with her hand as well as with her eye; and no one surpassed her in the extent of her washings, or the excellence of her dinners.

She was quite ready, therefore, to sigh and to sob when her husband told her what had happened during the night.  When he had ended, she said,—­