her favorite pastime. A slight movement, the
charming impatience with which the pretty fisher twitched her line from
the water when the fish had not bitten, was perhaps the electric shock
which struck upon the heart of the magistrate, hitherto irreproachable.
No one can say, perhaps, how the thing really came about. But I ought to
remark that during the interregnum that occurred between the making of
socks and night-caps and the assumption of municipal duties, Beauvisage
himself had practised the art of fishing with a line with distinguished
success. Probably it occurred to him that the poor young lady, having
more ardor than science, was not going the right way to work, and the
thought of improving her method may have been the real cause of his
apparent degeneracy. However that may be, it is certain that, crossing
the bridge in company with her mother, Mademoiselle Beauvisage suddenly
cried out, like a true _enfant terrible_,--

"Goodness! there's papa talking with that Parisian woman!"

To assure herself at a glance of the monstrous fact, to rush down the
bank and reach her husband (whom she found with laughing lips and the
happy air of a browsing sheep), to blast him with a stern "What are
you doing here?" to order his retreat to Arcis with the air of a queen,
while Mademoiselle Chocardelle, first astonished and then enlightened as
to what it all meant, went off into fits of laughter, took scarcely the
time I have taken to tell it. Such, madame, was the proceeding by which
Madame Beauvisage, _nee_ Grevin, rescued her husband; and though that
proceeding may be called justifiable, it was certainly injudicious,
for before night the whole town had heard of the catastrophe, and
Beauvisage, arraigned and convicted by common consent of deplorable
immorality, saw fresh desertions taking place in the already winnowed
phalanx of his partisans.

However, the Gondreville and Grevin side still held firm, and--would you
believe it, madame?--it was again Mademoiselle Antonia to whom we owe
the overthrow of their last rampart.

Here is the tale of that phenomenon: Mother Marie-des-Anges wanted an
interview with the Comte de Gondreville; but how to get it she did not
know, because to ask for it was not, as she thought, proper. Having, it
appears, unpleasant things to say to him, she did not wish to bring the
old man to the convent expressly to hear them; such a proceeding seemed
to her uncharitable. Besides, things comminatory de