y as the official scutcheon that "a notary lives here."

It was half-past five o'clock in the afternoon, at which hour the
old man usually sat digesting his dinner. He had drawn his black
leather-covered armchair before the fire, and put on his armor, a
painted pasteboard contrivance shaped like a top boot, which protected
his stockinged legs from the heat of the fire; for it was one of the
good man's habits to sit for a while after dinner with his feet on the
dogs and to stir up the glowing coals. He always ate too much; he was
fond of good living. Alas! if it had not been for that little failing,
would he not have been more perfect than it is permitted to mortal man
to be? Chesnel had finished his cup of coffee. His old housekeeper had
just taken away the tray which had been used for the purpose for the
last twenty years. He was waiting for his clerks to go before he himself
went out for his game at cards, and meanwhile he was thinking--no need
to ask of whom or what. A day seldom passed but he asked himself, "Where
is _he_? What is _he_ doing?" He thought that the Count was in Italy
with the fair Duchesse de Maufrigneuse.

When every franc of a man's fortune has come to him, not by inheritance,
but through his own earning and saving, it is one of his sweetest
pleasures to look back upon the pains that have gone to the making
of it, and then to plan out a future for his crowns. This it is to
conjugate the verb "to enjoy" in every tense. And the old lawyer, whose
affections were all bound up in a single attachment, was thinking that
all the carefully-chosen, well-tilled land which he had pinched and
scraped to buy would one day go to round the d'Esgrignon estates, and
the thought doubled his pleasure. His pride swelled as he sat at his
ease in the old armchair; and the building of glowing coals, which he
raised with the tongs, sometimes seemed to him to be the old noble
house built up again, thanks to his care. He pictured the young Count's
prosperity, and told himself that he had done well to live for such an
aim. Chesnel was not lacking in intelligence; sheer goodness was not
the sole source of his great devotion; he had a pride of his own; he was
like the nobles who used to rebuild a pillar in a cathedral to inscribe
their name upon it; he meant his name to be remembered by the great
house which he had restored. Future generations of d'Esgrignons should
speak of old Chesnel. Just at this point his old housekeeper ca