“And then, whenever there’s a marriage among ’em, he insists on having the bride come and pass an hour alone with him, and bless me! the peasants don’t take to that! The result is he’s always quarrelling with ’em.”
“That’s all right; I know enough about him.—Angélique Prudhomme, Madame Jolicœur, thirty-two years of age, laundress to all the notables of the town. The deuce! what an honor!”
“Ah! she’s a hussy, I tell you, is Madame Jolicœur! She keeps the town talking about her. She launders for the officers in the garrison and goes to balls with ’em.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Oh! so-so.—A saucy face, and a bold way—like a cuirassier! She’s already been the means of setting more than twelve people by the ears, and only a little while ago, on the town holiday, she waltzed with the drum-major, who quarrelled with a sapper because she’d made an appointment with the sapper to take a walk in the labyrinth. That would have been a serious matter, if Monsieur Jolicœur hadn’t turned up! But he’s good-natured; he made peace between the drum-major and the sapper, swearing to the latter that his wife didn’t intend to break her word to him, and that it was pure forgetfulness on her part.”
“That husband knows how to live.—Let’s go on. Cunégonde-Aline Trouillard, forty-four years old and keeps a very popular café.”
“Ah! that’s the lemonade woman! She’s always having the vapors and sick headaches and—in short, she always thinks she’s sick and passes her time taking medicine instead of staying at her desk.”
“She must be a very valuable woman to the druggists!”
“Her husband tries to be smart, to play the chemist; he makes coffee out of asparagus seed and sugar out of turnips. I’m sure that he’ll come to consult you too.”
I continued to make memoranda of Clairette’s answers, and we had almost exhausted the list, when there was a knock at our door. I answered the knock; it was our landlord, who had come to inform us that the mayor wished to see us, and that he expected us at his office. We could not decline that invitation. My companion donned his best coat and lent me a pair of black silk knee-breeches that reached to my heels, the little hunchback having purchased them at secondhand from a great poet, who had them from an actor at one of the boulevard theatres, who had them from a member of the Academy who was paying court to a ballet dancer, at whose rooms he had left them.