on as they saw us they all exclaimed: 'Well, have you settled the
affair of that pig of a Morin?' All La Rochelle was excited about it, and
Rivet, who had got over his ill-humor on the journey, had great
difficulty in keeping himself from laughing as he said: 'Yes, we have
managed it, thanks to Labarbe: And we went to Morin's.

"He was sitting in an easy-chair with mustard plasters on his legs and
cold bandages on his head, nearly dead with misery. He was coughing with
the short cough of a dying man, without any one knowing how he had caught
it, and his wife looked at him like a tigress ready to eat him, and as
soon as he saw us he trembled so violently as to make his hands and knees
shake, so I said to him immediately: 'It is all settled, you dirty scamp,
but don't do such a thing again.'

"He got up, choking, took my hands and kissed them as if they had
belonged to a prince, cried, nearly fainted, embraced Rivet and even
kissed Madame Morin, who gave him such a push as to send him staggering
back into his chair; but he never got over the blow; his mind had been
too much upset. In all the country round, moreover, he was called nothing
but 'that pig of a Morin,' and that epithet went through him like a
sword-thrust every time he heard it. When a street boy called after him
'Pig!' he turned his head instinctively. His friends also overwhelmed him
with horrible jokes and used to ask him, whenever they were eating ham,
'Is it a bit of yourself?' He died two years later.

"As for myself, when I was a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in
1875, I called on the new notary at Fousserre, Monsieur Belloncle, to
solicit his vote, and a tall, handsome and evidently wealthy lady
received me. 'You do not know me again?' she said. And I stammered out:
'Why--no--madame.' 'Henriette Bonnel.' 'Ah!' And I felt myself
turning pale, while she seemed perfectly at her ease and looked at me
with a smile.

"As soon as she had left me alone with her husband he took both my hands,
and, squeezing them as if he meant to crush them, he said: 'I have been
intending to go and see you for a long time, my dear sir, for my wife has
very often talked to me about you. I know--yes, I know under what
painful circumstances you made her acquaintance, and I know also how
perfectly you behaved, how full of delicacy, tact and devotion you showed
yourself in the affair--' He hesitated and then said in a lower
tone, as if he had been saying something low and