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All heads were at the window of the Soudry salon which looked to the square. Recognizing the father of his daughter-in-law, Soudry came to the portico to receive him. "Well, comrade," said the mayor of Soulanges, "is Annette ill, that you give us your company of an evening?" Through an old habit acquired in the gendarmerie Soudry always went direct to the point.
All the lots were knocked down to Rigou, and the price paid amounted to two millions five hundred thousand francs. The next day Rigou had the names changed; Monsieur Gaubertin took the woods, Rigou and Soudry the vineyards and the farms.
If Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin had lived at Ville-aux-Fayes, they would have quarrelled; their various pretensions would have clashed; but fate ordained that the Lucullus of Blangy felt too strongly the need of solitude, in which to wallow at his ease in usury and sensuality, to live anywhere but at Blangy; that Madame Soudry had sense enough to see that she could reign nowhere else except at Soulanges; and that Ville-aux-Fayes was Gaubertin's place of business.
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.
"Then he's lost," said Lupin, rubbing his hands; "the peasants will fight." "Fight!" cried Soudry, "that depends. If the prefect and the general, who are friends, send a squadron of cavalry the peasants can't fight. They might at a pinch get the better of the gendarmes, but as for resisting a charge of cavalry!
He knew Soudry, the brigadier at Soulanges, for brigadiers of gendarmerie, performing functions that are semi-judicial in drawing up criminal indictments, have much to do with the rural keepers, who are, in fact, their natural spies.
"No, There's trouble brewing," replied Rigou, touching his right fore-finger to the hand which Soudry held out to him. "I came to talk about it, for it concerns our children in a way " Soudry, a handsome man dressed in blue, as though he were still a gendarme, with a black collar, and spurs at his heels, took Rigou by the arm and led him up to his imposing better-half.
The settlement of his estate, sharply contested by collateral heirs, dragged slowly along until, in 1798, Soudry, who had then returned to Soulanges, was able to buy the wine-merchant's palace for three thousand francs in specie. He then let it, in the first instance, to the government for the headquarters of the gendarmerie.
"He didn't find anything at all," said Soudry; "but, as President Gendrin says, it is a good thing to let people suppose that poison will always be found " "Madame Pigeron was very wise to leave Auxerre," said Madame Vermut; "she was silly and wicked both. As if it were necessary to have recourse to drugs to annul a husband!
Young Soudry, a companion of Gaubertin's son in Paris as well as at Les Aigues, had just been appointed assistant attorney in the capital of the department. Before the elder Soudry, a quartermaster in the artillery, became a brigadier of gendarmes, he had been wounded in a skirmish while defending Monsieur de Soulanges, then adjutant-general.
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