of the Breton character, and
declared that no power, no will, could ever conquer it. Rogron and his
sister were so shrewdly flattered by the two manoeuvrers that the
former agreed to go security for the "Courrier de Provins," and the
latter invested five thousand francs in the enterprise.

On this, the colonel and lawyer took the field. They got a hundred
shares, of five hundred francs each, taken among the farmers and
others called independents, and also among those who had bought lands
of the national domains,--whose fears they worked upon. They even
extended their operations throughout the department and along its
borders. Each shareholder of course subscribed to the paper. The
judicial advertisements were divided between the "Bee-hive" and the
"Courrier." The first issue of the latter contained a pompous eulogy
on Rogron. He was presented to the community as the Laffitte of
Provins. The public mind having thus received an impetus in this new
direction, it was manifest, of course, that the coming elections would
be contested. Madame Tiphaine, whose highest hope was to take her
husband to Paris as deputy, was in despair. After reading an article
in the new paper aimed at her and at Julliard junior, she remarked:
"Unfortunately for me, I forgot that there is always a scoundrel close
to a dupe, and that fools are magnets to clever men of the fox breed."

As soon as the "Courrier" was fairly launched on a radius of fifty
miles, Vinet bought a new coat and decent boots, waistcoats, and
trousers. He set up the gray slouch hat sacred to liberals, and showed
his linen. His wife took a servant, and appeared in public dressed as
the wife of a prominent man should be; her caps were pretty. Vinet
proved grateful--out of policy. He and his friend Cournant, the
liberal notary and the rival of the ministerial notary Auffray, became
the close advisers of the Rogrons, to whom they were able to do a
couple of signal services. The leases granted by old Rogron to their
father in 1815, when matters were at a low ebb, were about to expire.
Horticulture and vegetable gardening had developed enormously in the
neighborhood of Provins. The lawyer and notary set to work to enable
the Rogrons to increase their rentals. Vinet won two lawsuits against
two districts on a question of planting trees, which involved five
hundred poplars. The proceeds of the poplars, added to the savings of
the brother and sister, who for the last three years had la