“What a wretch!”

“And do you know,” said the girl, “with whom I was to begin this odious trade?  Why, with a Madame de-Fremont, or de Bremont, I do not remember which, a very religious woman, whose daughter, a young married lady, received visits a great deal too frequent (according to the superior) from a certain manufacturer.”

“What do you say?” cried Agricola.  “This manufacturer must be—­”

“M.  Hardy.  I had too many reasons to remember that name, when it was pronounced by the superior.  Since that day, so many other events have taken place, that I had almost forgotten the circumstance.  But it is probable that this young lady is the one of whom I heard speak at the convent.”

“And what interest had the superior of the convent to set a spy upon her?” asked the smith.

“I do not know; but it is clear that the same interest still exists, since the young lady was followed, and perhaps, at this hour, is discovered and dishonored.  Oh! it is dreadful!” Then, seeing Agricola start suddenly, Mother Bunch added:  “What, then, is the matter?”

“Yes—­why not?” said the smith, speaking to himself; “why may not all this be the work of the same hand?  The superior of a convent may have a private understanding with an abbe—­but, then, for what end?”

“Explain yourself, Agricola,” said the girl.  “And then,—­where did you get your wound?  Tell me that, I conjure you.”

“It is of my wound that I am just going to speak; for in truth, the more I think of it, the more this adventure of the young lady seems to connect itself with other facts.”

“How so?”

“You must know that, for the last few days, singular things are passing in the neighborhood of our factory.  First, as we are in Lent, an abbe from Paris (a tall, fine-looking man, they say) has come to preach in the little village of Villiers, which is only a quarter of a league from our works.  The abbe has found occasion to slander and attack M. Hardy in his sermons.”

“How is that?”

“M.  Hardy has printed certain rules with regard to our work, and the rights and benefits he grants us.  These rules are followed by various maxims as noble as they are simple; with precepts of brotherly love such as all the world can understand, extracted from different philosophies and different religions.  But because M. Hardy has chosen what is best in all religions, the abbe concludes that M. Hardy has no religion at all, and he has therefore not only attacked him for this in the pulpit, but has denounced our factory as a centre of perdition and damnable corruption, because, on Sundays, instead of going to listen to his sermons, or to drink at a tavern, our comrades, with their wives and children, pass their time in cultivating their little gardens, in reading, singing in chorus, or dancing together in the common dwelling house.  The abbe has even gone so far as to say, that the neighborhood of such an assemblage of atheists, as he calls us, might draw down the anger of Heaven upon the country—­that the hovering of Cholera was much talked of, and that very possibly, thanks to our impious presence, the plague might fall upon all our neighborhood.”