“Ah!” she replied with a sigh, “it is impossible to make everybody rich.”
At the beginning of this year an event occurred which was destined to change the whole interior life of this woman and to transform the splendid expression of her countenance into something far more interesting in the eyes of painters.
Becoming uneasy about his health, Graslin, to his wife’s despair, no longer desired to live on the ground-floor. He returned to the conjugal chamber and allowed himself to be nursed. The news soon spread throughout Limoges that Madame Graslin was pregnant. Her sadness, mingled with joy, struck the minds of her friends, who then for the first time perceived that in spite of her virtues she had been happy in the fact of living separate from her husband. Perhaps she had hoped for some better fate ever since the time when, as it was known, the attorney-general had declined to marry the richest heiress in the place, in order to keep his loyalty to her.
From this suggestion there grew up in the minds of the profound politicians who played their whist at the hotel Graslin a belief that the viscount and the young wife had based certain hopes on the ill-health of the banker which were now frustrated. The great agitations which marked this period of Veronique’s life, the anxieties which a first childbirth causes in every woman, and which, it is said, threatens special danger when she is past her first youth, made her friends more attentive than ever to her; they vied with each other in showing her those little kindnesses which proved how warm and solid their affection really was.
V. TASCHERON
It was in this year that Limoges witnessed a terrible event and the singular drama of the Tascheron trial, in which the young Vicomte de Grandville displayed the talents which afterwards made him procureur-general.
An old man living in a lonely house in the suburb of Saint-Etienne was murdered. A large fruit-garden lay between the road and the house, which was also separated from the adjoining fields by a pleasure-garden, at the farther end of which were several old and disused greenhouses. In front of the house a rapid slope to the river bank gave a view of the Vienne. The courtyard, which also sloped downward, ended at a little wall, from which small columns rose at equal distances united by a railing, more, however, for ornament than protection, for the bars of the railing were of painted wood.
The old man, named Pingret, noted for his avarice, lived with a single woman-servant, a country-girl who did all the work of the house. He himself took care of his espaliers, trimmed his trees, gathered his fruit, and sent it to Limoges for sale, together with early vegetables, in the raising of which he excelled.
The niece of this old man, and his sole heiress, married to a gentleman of small means living in Limoges, a Madame des Vanneaulx, had again and again urged her uncle to hire a man to protect the house, pointing out to him that he would thus obtain the profits of certain uncultivated ground where he now grew nothing but clover. But the old man steadily refused. More than once a discussion on the subject had cut into the whist-playing of Limoges. A few shrewd heads declared that the old miser buried his gold in that clover-field.