note.

For about seven or eight years the little tavern had been kept by a man
and his wife, with two servants,--a chambermaid named Trinette, and
a hostler called Pecaud. This small staff was quite equal to all
the requirements, for a canal between Beaucaire and Aiguemortes had
revolutionized transportation by substituting boats for the cart and
the stagecoach. And, as though to add to the daily misery which this
prosperous canal inflicted on the unfortunate inn-keeper, whose utter
ruin it was fast accomplishing, it was situated between the Rhone from
which it had its source and the post-road it had depleted, not a
hundred steps from the inn, of which we have given a brief but faithful
description.

The inn-keeper himself was a man of from forty to fifty-five years of
age, tall, strong, and bony, a perfect specimen of the natives of those
southern latitudes; he had dark, sparkling, and deep-set eyes, hooked
nose, and teeth white as those of a carnivorous animal; his hair, like
his beard, which he wore under his chin, was thick and curly, and in
spite of his age but slightly interspersed with a few silvery threads.
His naturally dark complexion had assumed a still further shade of brown
from the habit the unfortunate man had acquired of stationing himself
from morning till eve at the threshold of his door, on the lookout for
guests who seldom came, yet there he stood, day after day, exposed to
the meridional rays of a burning sun, with no other protection for his
head than a red handkerchief twisted around it, after the manner of
the Spanish muleteers. This man was our old acquaintance, Gaspard
Caderousse. His wife, on the contrary, whose maiden name had been
Madeleine Radelle, was pale, meagre, and sickly-looking. Born in the
neighborhood of Arles, she had shared in the beauty for which its women
are proverbial; but that beauty had gradually withered beneath the
devastating influence of the slow fever so prevalent among dwellers
by the ponds of Aiguemortes and the marshes of Camargue. She remained
nearly always in her second-floor chamber, shivering in her chair, or
stretched languid and feeble on her bed, while her husband kept his
daily watch at the door--a duty he performed with so much the greater
willingness, as it saved him the necessity of listening to the endless
plaints and murmurs of his helpmate, who never saw him without breaking
out into bitter invectives against fate; to all of which her husband
would