“Ah, master, you have forgotten me. I am still waiting for your notes on consumption.”
It was Dr. Ramond, a young physician, who had settled two years before at Plassans, where he was building up a fine practise. With a superb head, in the brilliant prime of a gracious manhood, he was adored by the women, but he had fortunately a great deal of good sense and a great deal of prudence.
“Why, Ramond, good day! Not at all, my dear friend; I have not forgotten you. It is this little girl, to whom I gave the notes yesterday to copy, and who has not touched them yet.”
The two young people shook hands with an air of cordial intimacy.
“Good day, Mlle. Clotilde.”
“Good day, M. Ramond.”
During a gastric fever, happily mild, which the young girl had had the preceding year, Dr. Pascal had lost his head to the extent of distrusting his own skill, and he had asked his young colleague to assist him—to reassure him. Thus it was that an intimacy, a sort of comradeship, had sprung up among the three.
“You shall have your notes to-morrow, I promise you,” she said, smiling.
Ramond walked on with them, however, until they reached the end of the Rue de la Banne, at the entrance of the old quarter whither they were going. And there was in the manner in which he leaned, smiling, toward Clotilde, the revelation of a secret love that had grown slowly, awaiting patiently the hour fixed for the most reasonable of dénouements. Besides, he listened with deference to Dr. Pascal, whose works he admired greatly.
“And it just happens, my dear friend, that I am going to Guiraude’s, that woman, you know, whose husband, a tanner, died of consumption five years ago. She has two children living—Sophie, a girl now going on sixteen, whom I fortunately succeeded in having sent four years before her father’s death to a neighboring village, to one of her aunts; and a son, Valentin, who has just completed his twenty-first year, and whom his mother insisted on keeping with her through a blind affection, notwithstanding that I warned her of the dreadful results that might ensue. Well, see if I am right in asserting that consumption is not hereditary, but only that consumptive parents transmit to their children a degenerate soil, in which the disease develops at the slightest contagion. Now, Valentin, who lived in daily contact with his father, is consumptive, while Sophie, who grew up in the open air, has superb health.”