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Julien Minard, the young lawyer, suffered from his father as much as his father suffered from his wife. Zelie had grown pretentious with wealth, without, at the same time, learning to speak French. She was now very fat, and gave the idea, in her rich surroundings, of a cook married to her master.
"Who is that little monsieur?" asked Minard of Barbet. "I have seen him here several times." "He is a tenant," replied Metivier, shuffling the cards. "A lawyer," added Barbet, in a low voice, "who occupies a small apartment on the third floor front. Oh! He doesn't amount to much; he has nothing." "What is the name of that young man?" said Olivier Vinet to Thuillier.
"Well, perhaps he's a fortune-teller like Madame Fontaine, who managed once upon a time to upset me when Madame Minard and I, just to amuse ourselves, went to consult her." "Well, if he is not a sorcerer he certainly has a very long arm," said Thuillier, "and I think a man would suffer for it if he didn't respect his advice.
"The point which gives this great astronomical event a special interest on this occasion," continued Minard, "is that the author of the discovery is a denizen of the twelfth arrondissement, which many of you still inhabit, or have inhabited. But other points are striking in this great scientific fact.
"And this is the man," said Madame Phellion, half beside herself, and kissing Felix with effusion, "to whom that la Peyrade is preferred!" "No, not preferred, madame," said Minard, "for the Thuilliers are not the dupes of that adventurer. But he has made himself necessary to them.
In that old maid there's always something of Madame la Ressource in Moliere's 'Miser." "I think, Monsieur le maire, that you are mistaken," said Phellion. "Madame la Ressource is a character in 'Turcaret, a very immoral play by the late Le Sage." "Do you think so?" said Minard. "Well, very likely.
Minard had purchased one of those large and sumptuous habitations which the old religious orders built about the Sorbonne, and as Thuillier mounted the broad stone steps with an iron balustrade, that proved how arts of the second class flourished under Louis XIII., he envied both the mansion and its occupant, the mayor.
When one thinks that, except on the day of the famous dance of the candidacy, they never once opened the piano in the rue Saint-Dominique!" "It would have been, I am sure, most agreeable to the company to have a talent like yours put in requisition," remarked Minard; "but those are not ideas that could ever come into the mind of that good Brigitte. She'd have seen two more candles to light.
Zelie Minard, formerly a flower-maker, felt an ardent passion for the upper social spheres, and desired to enter them through the marriages of her son and daughter; whereas Minard, wiser than she, and imbued with the vigor of the middle classes, which the revolution of July had infiltrated into the fibres of government, thought only of wealth and fortune.
"Theodose de la Peyrade; he is a barrister," replied Thuillier, in a whisper. At that moment the women present, as well as the men, looked at the two young fellows, and Madame Minard remarked to Colleville: "He is rather good-looking, that stranger."
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