t,
none the less, to inflame the ardor of her champion Solonet. The mother
and daughter were therefore under arms when Paul arrived, bearing the
bouquet which for the last few months he had daily offered to his
love. All three conversed pleasantly while awaiting the arrival of the
notaries.

This day brought to Paul the first skirmish of that long and wearisome
warfare called marriage. It is therefore necessary to state the forces
on both sides, the position of the belligerent bodies, and the ground on
which they are about to manoeuvre.

To maintain a struggle, the importance of which had wholly escaped him,
Paul's only auxiliary was the old notary, Mathias. Both were about to be
confronted, unaware and defenceless, by a most unexpected circumstance;
to be pressed by an enemy whose strategy was planned, and driven to
decide on a course without having time to reflect upon it. Where is
the man who would not have succumbed, even though assisted by Cujas and
Barthole? How should he look for deceit and treachery where all seemed
compliant and natural? What could old Mathias do alone against Madame
Evangelista, against Solonet, against Natalie, especially when a client
in love goes over to the enemy as soon as the rising conflict threatens
his happiness? Already Paul was damaging his cause by making the
customary lover's speeches, to which his passion gave excessive value
in the ears of Madame Evangelista, whose object it was to drive him to
commit himself.

The matrimonial condottieri now about to fight for their clients,
whose personal powers were to be so vitally important in this solemn
encounter, the two notaries, on short, represent individually the old
and the new systems,--old fashioned notarial usage, and the new-fangled
modern procedure.

Maitre Mathias was a worthy old gentleman sixty-nine years of age, who
took great pride in his forty years' exercise of the profession. His
huge gouty feet were encased in shoes with silver buckles, making a
ridiculous termination to legs so spindling, with knees so bony, that
when he crossed them they made you think of the emblems on a tombstone.
His puny little thighs, lost in a pair of wide black breeches fastened
with buckles, seemed to bend beneath the weight of a round stomach and
a torso developed, like that of most sedentary persons, into a stout
barrel, always buttoned into a green coat with square tails, which no
man could remember to have ever seen new. His hair, we