Here is “the stranger to the town” predicted by the fortune-teller, thought Pélagie even before she had seen him, and she spoke of her hope to her grandmother.
“There is one thing to which I will never consent,” replied the latter, “it is that you should marry any one who is not of a good bourgeoise family,” and her grandmother assumed an air of authority, at which the young girl laughed heartily.
The young surgeon’s name was Pierre Seron, and he could not have been better born in the bourgeoise class. He was descended from one of the physicians of Louis XIV. His father was the most prominent doctor at Compiègne, and his reputation reached as far as Paris. A cousin Seron had been a Conventional with Jean de Bien, and had played a great political rôle in Belgium, from whence the first French Serons had come.
“Of good family!” Pélagie and her grandmother repeated in chorus. “If only he has not had too commonplace an existence,” thought Pélagie.
Pierre Seron went up and down all the streets of the town, so as to make believe that he had already secured practice on arriving, and he soon had some successful cases which gave him a reputation.
He was a superb-looking man, his figure resembling that of a grenadier of the Imperial Guard. His face was not handsome. He wore his hair flat à la Napoleon, but his forehead was a little narrow, and he had great, convex, grey eyes and too full a nose, but his mouth—he was always clean-shaven—wore an attractive, gay, and mocking smile, in spite of very thick, sensual lips.
He was never seen except in a dress coat and white cravat. In a word, well-built, of fine presence, Pierre Seron had a distinguished air and was really a very handsome man.
He would have needed to be blind, and not to have had the necessity of making a rich marriage, if he had not remarked the interest which Mlle. Pélagie Raincourt took in his comings and goings.
“Why, his father being a doctor at Compiègne, has this young surgeon come to establish himself at Chauny?” asked the grandmother often. “There must be something,” she said.
Oh, yes! there was something. And, as Pierre Seron was rather talkative and as Compiègne was not a hundred leagues from Chauny, the story was soon known.