adis, "they bore my mother and annoy my wife. When
Mademoiselle Sylvie was apprenticed, thirty years ago, to my father,
none of them could endure her."

"I have a great mind," said Madame Tiphaine, putting her pretty foot on
the bar of the fender, "to make it understood that my salon is not an
inn."

Julliard raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if to say, "Good heavens?
what wit, what intellect!"

"I wish my society to be select; and it certainly will not be if I admit
those Rogrons."

"They have neither heart, nor mind, nor manners"; said Monsieur
Tiphaine. "If, after selling thread for twenty years, as my sister did
for example--"

"Your sister, my dear," said his wife in a parenthesis, "cannot be out
of place in any salon."

"--if," he continued, "people are stupid enough not to throw off the
shop and polish their manners, if they don't know any better than to
mistake the Counts of Champagne for the _accounts_ of a wine-shop, as
Rogron did this evening, they had better, in my opinion, stay at home."

"They are simply impudent," said Julliard. "To hear them talk you would
suppose there was no other handsome house in Provins but theirs. They
want to crush us; and after all, they have hardly enough to live on."

"If it was only the brother," said Madame Tiphaine, "one might put up
with him; he is not so aggressive. Give him a Chinese puzzle and he will
stay in a corner quietly enough; it would take him a whole winter to
find it out. But Mademoiselle Sylvie, with that voice like a hoarse
hyena and those lobster-claws of hands! Don't repeat all this,
Julliard."

When Julliard had departed the little woman said to her husband:--

"I have aborigines enough whom I am forced to receive; these two will
fairly kill me. With your permission, I shall deprive myself of their
society."

"You are mistress in your own house," replied he; "but that will make
enemies. The Rogrons will fling themselves into the opposition, which
hitherto has had no real strength in Provins. That Rogron is already
intimate with Baron Gouraud and the lawyer Vinet."

"Then," said Melanie, laughing, "they will do you some service. Where
there are no opponents, there is no triumph. A liberal conspiracy,
an illegal cabal, a struggle of any kind, will bring you into the
foreground."

The justice looked at his young wife with a sort of alarmed admiration.

The next day it was whispered about that the Rogrons had not altogether
succeeded in Mad