"Pardon me," interrupted the judge. "It is a detail such as may well become valuable, though apparently foreign to the case, and at the first view, insignificant."
"Hum!" grunted Papa Plantat. "Insignificant—foreign to it!"
His tone was so singular, his air so strange, that M. Domini was struck by it.
"Do you share," he asked, "the opinion of the mayor regarding the
Tremorels?"
Plantat shrugged his shoulders.
"I haven't any opinions," he answered: "I live alone—see nobody; don't disturb myself about anything. But—"
"It seems to me," said M. Courtois, "that nobody should be better acquainted with people who were my friends than I myself."
"Then, you are telling the story clumsily," said M. Plantat, dryly.
The judge of instruction pressed him to explain himself. So M. Plantat, without more ado, to the great scandal of the mayor, who was thus put into the background, proceeded to dilate upon the main features of the count's and countess's biography.
"The Countess de Tremorel, nee Bertha Lechaillu, was the daughter of a poor village school-master. At eighteen, her beauty was famous for three leagues around, but as she only had for dowry her great blue eyes and blond ringlets, but few serious lovers presented themselves. Already Bertha, by advice of her family, had resigned herself to take a place as a governess—a sad position for so beautiful a maid—when the heir of one of the richest domains in the neighborhood happened to see her, and fell in love with her.