Vaudoyer, the former field-keeper, a man five feet six inches tall, with a face pitted with the small-pox and furrowed like a nut-cracker, kept silence with a hesitating air.
“Well, you old ninny, does that ruffle you?” asked Tonsard, attracted by the idea of damages. “If they had broken twenty crowns’ worth of my mother’s bones we could turn it into good account; we might make a fine fuss for three hundred francs; Monsieur Gourdon would go to Les Aigues and tell them that the mother had got a broken hip—”
“And break it, too,” interrupted Madame Tonsard; “they do that in Paris.”
“It would cost too much,” remarked Godain.
“I have been too long among the people who rule us to believe that matters will go as you want them,” said Vaudoyer at last, remembering his past official intercourse with the courts and the gendarmerie. “If it were at Soulanges, now, it might be done; Monsieur Soudry represents the government there, and he doesn’t wish well to the Shopman; but if you attack the Shopman and Vatel they’ll defend themselves viciously; they’ll say, ‘The woman was to blame; she had a tree, otherwise she would have let her bundle be examined on the highroad; she wouldn’t have run away; if an accident happened to her it was through her own fault.’ No, you can’t trust to that plan.”
“The Shopman didn’t resist when I sued him,” said Courtecuisse; “he paid me at once.”
“I’ll go to Soulanges, if you like,” said Bonnebault, “and consult Monsieur Gourdon, the clerk of the court, and you shall know to-night if there’s money in it.”
“You are only making an excuse to be after that big goose of a girl, Socquard’s daughter,” said Marie Tonsard, giving Bonnebault a slap on the shoulder that made his lungs hum.
Just then a verse of an old Burgundian Christmas carol was heard:—
“One fine moment of his life
Was at the wedding feast;
He changed the water into wine,—
Madeira of the best.”