第90章

Monsieur Lupin's son, Amaury, was a great trouble to his father.An only son, and one of the Don Juans of the valley, he utterly refused to follow the paternal profession.He took advantage of his position as only son to bleed the strong-box cruelly, without, however, exhausting the patience of his father, who would say after every escapade, "Well, I was like that in my young days." Amaury never came to Madame Soudry's; he said she bored him; for, with a recollection of her early days, she attempted to "educate" him, as she called it, whereas he much preferred the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de la Paix.He frequented the worst company of Soulanges, even down to Bonnebault.He continued sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry remarked, and replied to all his father's remonstrances with one perpetual request: "Send me back to Paris, for I am bored to death here."

Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was semi-conjugal.His known passion, in spite of his former liaison with Madame Sarcus, was for the wife of the under-sheriff of the municipal court,--Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer, who reigned in the second-class society as Madame Soudry did in the first.Monsieur Plissoud, a competitor of Brunet, belonged to the under-world of Soulanges on account of his wife's conduct, which it was said he authorized,--a report that drew upon him the contempt of the leading society.

If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon, the doctor, was its man of science.The town said of him, "We have here in our midst a scientific man of the first order." Madame Soudry (who believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini and Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera)

persuaded society, and even Lupin himself, that he might have made his fortune by his voice, and, in like manner, she was always regretting that the doctor did not publish his scientific ideas.

Monsieur Gourdon merely repeated the ideas of Cuvier and Buffon, which might not have enabled him to pose as a scientist before the Soulanges world; but besides this he was making a collection of shells, and he possessed an herbarium, and he knew how to stuff birds.He lived upon the glory of having bequeathed his cabinet of natural history to the town of Soulanges.After this was known he was considered throughout the department as a great naturalist and the successor of Buffon.Like a certain Genevese banker, whose pedantry, coldness, and puritan propriety he copied, without possessing either his money or his shrewdness, Monsieur Gourdon exhibited with great complacency the famous collection, consisting of a bear and a monkey (both of which had died on their way to Soulanges), all the rodents of the department, mice and field-mice and dormice, rats, muskrats, and moles, etc.; all the interesting birds ever shot in Burgundy, and an Alpine eagle caught in the Jura.Gourdon also possessed a collection of lepidoptera,--a word which led society to hope for monstrosities, and to say, when it saw them, "Why, they are only butterflies!"

Besides these things he had a fine array of fossil shells, mostly the collections of his friends which they bequeathed to him, and all the minerals of Burgundy and the Jura.

These treasures, laid out on shelves with glass doors (the drawers beneath containing the insects), occupied the whole of the first floor of the doctor's house, and produced a certain effect through the oddity of the names on the tickets, the magic effect of the colors, and the gathering together of so many things which no one pays the slightest attention to when seen in nature, though much admired under glass.Society took a regular day to go and look at Monsieur Gourdon's collection.

"I have," he said to all inquirers, "five hundred ornithological objects, two hundred mammifers, five thousand insects, three thousand shells, and seven thousand specimens of minerals."

"What patience you have had!" said the ladies.

"One must do something for one's country," replied the collector.

He drew an enormous profit from his carcasses by the mere repetition of the words, "I have bequeathed everything to the town by my will."

Visitors lauded his philanthropy; the authorities talked of devoting the second floor of the town hall to the "Gourdon Museum," after the collector's death.

"I rely upon the gratitude of my fellow-citizens to attach my name to the gift," he replied; "for I dare not hope they would place a marble bust of me--"

"It would be the very least we could do for you," they rejoined; "are you not the glory of our town?"

Thus the man actually came to consider himself one of the celebrities of Burgundy.The surest incomes are not from consols after all; those our vanity obtains for us have better security.This man of science was, to employ Lupin's superlatives, happy! happy!! happy!!!

Gourdon, the clerk of the court, brother of the doctor, was a pitiful little creature, whose features all gathered about his nose, so that the nose seemed the point of departure for the forehead, the cheeks, and the mouth, all of which were connected with it just as the ravines of a mountain begin at the summit.This pinched little man was thought to be one of the greatest poets in Burgundy,--a Piron, it was the fashion to say.The dual merits of the two brothers gave rise to the remark: "We have the brothers Gourdon at Soulanges--two very distinguished men; men who could hold their own in Paris."

Devoted to the game of cup-and-ball, the clerk of the court became possessed by another mania,--that of composing an ode in honor of an amusement which amounted to a passion in the eighteenth century.