In addition to this unsavory reputation, Loiseau was famous for his various practical jokes, his good or bad tricks; and nobody could mention his name without adding immediately:—"Loiseau is merciless; he spares nobody!"—
Undersized, he had a balloon shaped stomach surmounted by a florid face between a pair of grayish whiskers.
His wife, tall, stout determined, with a loud voice, a woman of quick decision, represented order and arithmetic in the business house which her husband enlivened by his mirthful activity.
Beside them sat, more dignified and belonging to a superior class, Mr. Carré-Lamadon, a man of considerable standing, a leader in the cotton business, proprietor of three spinning mills, officer of the Legion of Honor and member of the General Council. During the Empire he had been the leader of the friendly opposition, solely for the purpose of commanding a higher price for his support when he rallied to the cause which he was fighting daily with courteous weapons, according to his own expression. Mrs. Carré-Lamadon, considerably younger than her husband, remained the consolation of Officers belonging to good families who had been quartered in Rouen.
She was sitting opposite her husband, pretty, slender, graceful, curled in her furs, and gazed mournfully at the lamentable interior of the coach.
Her neighbors, Count and Countess Hubert de Bréville, bore one of the most ancient and noble names of Normandy. the Count, an old nobleman of aristocratic bearing, endeavored to accentuate by the artifices of his toilette his natural resemblance to King Henry IV, who, according to a legend, in which the family gloried, had caused the maternity of a de Bréville lady whose husband, on account of his royal connection, had been made a Count and Governor of a Province.
A Colleague of Carré-Lamadon in the General Council, Count Hubert represented the Orleanist party in his Department. The story of his marriage with the daughter of a small ship-owner of Nantes had always remained mysterious. But as the Countess had a grand air, entertained better than any other hostess, and was credited with having been the Dulcinea of one of Louis Philippe's sons, the whole nobility showed her the greatest consideration, and her salon remained the most exclusive in the locality, the only one where old gallantry was conserved and admission to which was not easy.
The wealth of the de Brévilles, all invested in real estate, was estimated to yield an annual income of five hundred thousand francs.
These six persons occupied the rear of the coach, the side of wealthy, serene and solid Society, authoritative, honest people who have religion and principles.
By a strange hazard, all the women were seated on the same side; and the Countess further had for neighbors two saintly nuns who fingered long rosaries and mumbled Paters and Aves. One of them was old and had a face so deeply pitted with smallpox, that she looked as if she had been shot full in the face by a rapid-firing gun. The other, very frail, had a pretty and sickly head on a narrow consumptive chest eaten up by that devouring faith which makes martyrs and visionaries. Seated opposite the nuns, a man and a woman attracted the eyes of all the other passengers.