gou.

Monsieur Lupin's son, Amaury, was a great trouble to his father. An
only son, and one of the Don Juans of the valley, he utterly refused
to follow the paternal profession. He took advantage of his position as
only son to bleed the strong-box cruelly, without, however, exhausting
the patience of his father, who would say after every escapade, "Well,
I was like that in my young days." Amaury never came to Madame Soudry's;
he said she bored him; for, with a recollection of her early days, she
attempted to "educate" him, as she called it, whereas he much preferred
the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de la Paix. He frequented the
worst company of Soulanges, even down to Bonnebault. He continued
sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry remarked, and replied to all
his father's remonstrances with one perpetual request: "Send me back to
Paris, for I am bored to death here."

Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was
semi-conjugal. His known passion, in spite of his former liaison with
Madame Sarcus, was for the wife of the under-sheriff of the municipal
court,--Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer, who
reigned in the second-class society as Madame Soudry did in the first.
Monsieur Plissoud, a competitor of Brunet, belonged to the under-world
of Soulanges on account of his wife's conduct, which it was said he
authorized,--a report that drew upon him the contempt of the leading
society.

If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon, the
doctor, was its man of science. The town said of him, "We have here
in our midst a scientific man of the first order." Madame Soudry (who
believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini and
Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera) persuaded
society, and even Lupin himself, that he might have made his fortune
by his voice, and, in like manner, she was always regretting that the
doctor did not publish his scientific ideas.

Monsieur Gourdon merely repeated the ideas of Cuvier and Buffon, which
might not have enabled him to pose as a scientist before the Soulanges
world; but besides this he was making a collection of shells, and he
possessed an herbarium, and he knew how to stuff birds. He lived upon
the glory of having bequeathed his cabinet of natural history to the
town of Soulanges. After this was known he was considered throughout
the department as a great naturalist and the success