The coach proceeded slowly, slowly, at a snail’s pace.  The wheels sank into the snow; the entire body of the carriage groaned with creaks; the animals were slipping, puffing, steaming, and the driver’s gigantic whip was cracking continuously, flying in every direction, coiling up and unrolling itself like a thin snake, and suddenly lashing some rounded back, which then stretched out under a more violent effort.

Imperceptibly the day was breaking.  Those light flakes that a traveler, a pure blood native of Rouen, had compared to a rain of cotton, had stopped falling.  A murky light filtered through the big, dark and heavy clouds, which rendered more dazzling the whiteness of the country where one could see now a line of tall trees spangled with hoar frost, now a cottage with a snow hood.

Inside the coach, the travelers eyed each other inquisitively in the melancholy light of the dawn.

Way in the rear, on the best seats, facing each other, Mr. and Mrs. Loiseau, wholesale wine dealers of the Rue Grand-Pont, were slumbering.

Former clerk to a merchant who had been ruined in business, Loiseau had bought his employer’s stock and made a fortune.  He was selling very cheap very bad wine to small liquor dealers in the country, and was considered by his friends and acquaintances as a sharp crook, a real Norman full of wiles and joviality.  His reputation as a crook was so well established that one evening at the Prefecture, Mr. Tournel, a writer of fables and songs, a biting and fine wit, a local literary glory, having proposed to the ladies’ whom he saw rather drowsy, to play a game of “L’oiseau vole,” (the bird steals—­flies) the joke flew through the salons of the Prefect and from there, reaching those of the town, made all the jaws of the Province laugh for a whole month.

In addition to this unsavory reputation, Loiseau was famous for his various practical jokes, his good or bad tricks; and nobody could mention his name without adding immediately:—­“Loiseau is merciless; he spares nobody!”—­

Undersized, he had a balloon shaped stomach surmounted by a florid face between a pair of grayish whiskers.

His wife, tall, stout determined, with a loud voice, a woman of quick decision, represented order and arithmetic in the business house which her husband enlivened by his mirthful activity.

Beside them sat, more dignified and belonging to a superior class, Mr. Carre-Lamadon, a man of considerable standing, a leader in the cotton business, proprietor of three spinning mills, officer of the Legion of Honor and member of the General Council.  During the Empire he had been the leader of the friendly opposition, solely for the purpose of commanding a higher price for his support when he rallied to the cause which he was fighting daily with courteous weapons, according to his own expression.  Mrs. Carre-Lamadon, considerably younger than her husband, remained the consolation of Officers belonging to good families who had been quartered in Rouen.