“And, by the way, how is Madame Bergeret?” he inquired.
As the north wind whistled across the Place Saint-Exupère M. Bergeret watched M. Mazure’s nose getting redder and redder under the turned-down brim of the straw hat. His own feet and knees were frozen, and he suffered his thoughts to play round the idea of Madame de Gromance just to get a little warmth and joy into his veins.
Paillot’s shop was not open, and the two professors, thus fireless and houseless, stood looking at each other in sad sympathy.
In the depths of his friendly heart M. Bergeret thought to himself:
“As soon as I leave this fellow with his limited, boorish ideas, I shall be once more alone in the desert waste of this hateful town. It will be wretched.”
And his feet remained glued to the sharp stones of the square, whilst the wind made his ears burn.
“I will walk back with you as far as your door,” said the archivist of the department.
Then they walked on side by side, bowing from time to time to fellow-citizens who hurried along in their Sunday clothes, carrying dolls and bags of sweets.
“This Countess de Gromance,” said the archivist, “was a Chapon. There was never but one Chapon heard of—her father, the most arrant skinflint in the province. But I have hunted up the record of the Gromance family, who belong to the lesser nobility of the place. There was a Demoiselle Cécile de Gromance who in 1815 gave birth to a child by a Cossack father. That will make a capital subject for an article in a local paper. I am writing a regular series of them.”
M. Mazure spoke the truth: every day, from sunrise to sunset, alone in his dusty garret under the roof of the prefecture, he eagerly ransacked the six hundred and thirty-seven thousand pigeonholes which were there huddled together. His gloomy hatred of his fellow-townsmen drove him to this research, merely in the hope that he would succeed in unearthing some scandalous facts about the most respected families in the neighbourhood. Amid piles of ancient parchments and papers stamped by the registrars of the last two centuries with the arms of six kings, two emperors and three republics he used to sit, laughing in the midst of the clouds of dust, as he stirred up the evidences, now half eaten up by mice and worms, of bygone crimes and sins long since expiated.