As they followed the windings of the Tintelleries, it was with the tale of these cruel revelations that he continued to entertain M. Bergeret, a man who always cultivated an attitude of particular indulgence towards our forefathers’ faults, and who was inquisitive merely in the matter of their habits and customs. Mazure had, or so he averred, discovered in the archives a certain Terremondre who, being a terrorist and president of a local club of Sans-Culottes in 1793, had changed his Christian names from Nicolas-Eustache to Marat-Peuplier. Instantly Mazure hastened to supply M. Jean de Terremondre, his colleague in the Archæological Society, who had gone over to the monarchical and clerical party, with full information touching this forgotten forbear of his, this Marat-Peuplier Terremondre, who had actually written a hymn to Saint Guillotine. He had also unearthed a great-great-uncle of the diocesan Vicar-General, a Sieur de Goulet, or rather, more precisely, a Goulet-Trocard as he signed himself, who, as an army contractor, was condemned to penal servitude in 1812 for having supplied glandered horseflesh instead of beef. The documents relating to this trial he had published in the most rabid journal in the department. M. Mazure promised still more terrible revelations about the Laprat family, revelations full of cases of incest; about the Courtrai family, with one of its members branded for high treason in 1814; about the Dellion family, whose wealth had been gained by gambling in wheat; about the Quatrebarbe family, whose ancestors, two stokers, a man and a woman, were hanged by lynch law on a tree on Duroc Hill at the time of the consulate. In fact, as late as 1860, old people were still to be met who remembered having seen in their childhood the branches of an oak from which hung a human form with long, black, floating tresses that used to frighten the horses.
“She remained hanging there for three years,” exclaimed the archivist, “and she was own grandmother to Hyacinthe Quatrebarbe, the diocesan architect!”
“It’s very singular,” said M. Bergeret, “but, of course, one ought to keep that kind of thing to oneself.”
But Mazure paid no heed. He longed to publish everything, to bruit everything abroad, in direct opposition to the opinion of M. Worms-Clavelin, the préfet, who wisely said: “One ought most carefully to avoid giving occasion to scandal and dissension.” He had threatened, in fact, to get the archivist dismissed, if he persisted in revealing old family secrets.
“Ah!” cried Mazure, chuckling in his tangled forest of beard, “it shall be known that in 1815 there was a little Cossack who came into the world through the exertions of a Demoiselle de Gromance.”
Only a moment since M. Bergeret had reached his own door, and he still held the handle of the bell.
“What does it matter, after all?” said he. “The poor lady did what she couldn’t help doing. She is dead, and the little Cossack also is dead. Let us leave their memory in peace, or if we recall it for a moment, let it be with a kindly thought. What zeal is it that so carries you away, dear Monsieur Mazure?”
“The zeal for justice.”
M. Bergeret pulled the bell.
“Good-bye, Mazure,” said he; “don’t be just, and do be merciful. I wish you a very happy New Year.”