Madame de Bergenheim, who was out of patience at this questioning, began to speak in a quick tone which was a contrast to her aunt’s solemn slowness.

“Rousselet,” said she, “when you took the newspapers out of the office, did you notice whether the wrappers were intact, or whether they had been opened?”

The good man half concealed his face in his cravat at this precise questioning, and it was with embarrassment that he replied, after a moment’s hesitation: 

“Certainly, Madame—­as to the wrappers—­I do not accuse the postmaster—­”

“If the journals were sealed when you received them, you are the only one who could have opened them.”

Rousselet straightened himself up to his full height, and, giving to his nut-cracker face the most dignified look possible, he said in a solemn tone: 

“With due deference to you, Madame, Leonard Rousselet is well known.  Fifty-seven years old on Saint-Hubert’s day, I am incapable of opening newspapers.  When they have been read at the chateau and they send me with them to the cure, I do not say—­perhaps on my way—­it is a recreation—­and then the cure is Jean Bartou, son of Joseph Bartou, the tilemaker.  But to read the newspaper before my masters have done so!  Never!  Leonard Rousselet is an old man incapable of such baseness.  Baptized when a child; fifty-seven years on Saint-Hubert’s day.”

“When you speak of your pastor, do so in a more becoming manner,” interrupted Mademoiselle de Colrandeuil, although she herself in private did not speak of the plebeian priest in very respectful terms.  But if Joseph Bartou’s son was always the son of Joseph Bartou to her, she meant that he should be Monsieur le Cure to the peasants.

Madame de Bergenheim had not been much affected by Pere Rousselet’s harangue, and shook her head impatiently, saying in an imperative tone: 

“I am certain that the newspapers have been opened by you, or by some person to whom you have given them, and I wish to know at once by whom.”

Rousselet dropped his pose of a Roman senator; passing his hand behind his ears, a familiar gesture with people when in embarrassing positions, he continued less emphatically: 

“I stopped on my way back at La Fauconnerie, at the ’Femme-sans-Tete Inn’.”

“And what were you doing in a tavern?” interrupted Mademoiselle de Corandeuil severely.  “You know it is not intended that the servants in this house should frequent taverns and such low places, which are not respectable and corrupt the morals of the lower classes.”

“Servants! lower classes!  Old aristocrat!” growled Rousselet secretly; but, not daring to show his ill humor, he replied in a bland voice: 

“If Mademoiselle had gone the same road that I did, with the same conveyance, she would know that it is a rather thirsty stretch.  I stopped at the ‘Femme-sans-Tete’ to wash the dust down my parched throat.  Whereupon Mademoiselle Reine—­the daughter of Madame Gobillot, the landlady of the inn—­Mademoiselle Reine asked me to allow her to look at the yellow-journal in which there are fashions for ladies; I asked her why; she said it was so that she might see how they made their bonnets, gowns, and other finery in Paris.  The frivolity of women!”