Monsieur de Jordy, like the doctor, had come to die in Nemours, but he
knew no one except the abbe, who was always at the beck and call of
his parishioners, and Madame de Portenduere, who went to bed at nine
o'clock. So, much against his will, he too had taken to going to bed
early, in spite of the thorns that beset his pillow. It was therefore a
great piece of good fortune for him (as well as for the doctor) when
he encountered a man who had known the same world and spoken the same
language as himself; with whom he could exchange ideas, and who went to
bed late. After Monsieur de Jordy, the Abbe Chaperon, and Minoret had
passed one evening together they found so much pleasure in it that the
priest and soldier returned every night regularly at nine o'clock, the
hour at which, little Ursula having gone to bed, the doctor was free.
All three would then sit up till midnight or one o'clock.

After a time this trio became a quartette. Another man to whom life
was known, and who owed to his practical training as a lawyer,
the indulgence, knowledge, observation, shrewdness, and talent for
conversation which the soldier, doctor, and priest owed to their
practical dealings with the souls, diseases, and education of men, was
added to the number. Monsieur Bongrand, the justice of peace, heard of
the pleasure of these evenings and sought admittance to the doctor's
society. Before becoming justice of peace at Nemours he had been for ten
years a solicitor at Melun, where he conducted his own cases, according
to the custom of small towns, where there are no barristers. He became a
widower at forty-five years of age, but felt himself still too active
to lead an idle life; he therefore sought and obtained the position of
justice of peace at Nemours, which became vacant a few months before
the arrival of Doctor Minoret. Monsieur Bongrand lived modestly on his
salary of fifteen hundred francs, in order that he might devote his
private income to his son, who was studying law in Paris under the
famous Derville. He bore some resemblance to a retired chief of a civil
service office; he had the peculiar face of a bureaucrat, less sallow
than pallid, on which public business, vexations, and disgust leave
their imprint,--a face lined by thought, and also by the continual
restraints familiar to those who are trained not to speak their minds
freely. It was often illumined by smiles characteristic of men who
alternately believe all and believe noth