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He dared not wander about Ingouville; moreover, he made it a point of honor to obey orders, and he therefore went back to Paris, previously writing a letter which Francoise Cochet duly delivered on the morrow with the Havre postmark. It was the custom of Monsieur and Madame Latournelle to dine at the Chalet every Sunday when they brought back Modeste after vespers.
Butscha, who met La Briere at the coach-door, took the box containing the precious work of art to Francoise Cochet, with instructions to place it on Modeste's dressing-table. "Of course you will accompany Mademoiselle Modeste on her ride to-day?" said Butscha, who went to Canalis's house to let La Briere know by a wink that the whip had gone to its destination.
Everything bears witness to the prolonged residence of man in a neighborhood which offered the attraction of vast deposits of chalk with bands of flint that supplied alike weapons and tools. The Abbe Cochet tells us of an atelier in the Aulne valley, and Maurice Sand of another near La Chatre, where we meet with the most ancient traces of man in Berry.
From that time forward the two powers went on shares shares a la Montgomery. Cochet praised Gaubertin to Madame, and Gaubertin praised Cochet. The waiting-maid had already made her own bed, and knew she was down for sixty thousand francs in the will. Madame could not do without Cochet, to whom she was accustomed.
The terrible Mademoiselle Cochet, her maid and female vizier, had tried to enlighten her mistress when she saw the ascendency Gaubertin was obtaining over one whom he began by calling "Madame" in defiance of the revolutionary laws about equality; but Gaubertin, in his turn, enlightened Mademoiselle Cochet by showing her a so-called denunciation sent to his father, the prosecuting attorney, in which she was vehemently accused of corresponding with Pitt and Coburg.
After an administration of twenty-five years, Gaubertin, the land-steward, found himself in possession of six hundred thousand francs in money, and Cochet had accumulated nearly two hundred and fifty thousand. On the death of Mademoiselle Laguerre, Jenny, the steward's eldest daughter was asked in marriage by Leclercq.
The colonel invited the duke and Canalis to dine with him sociably in their riding-dress, promising them to make no change himself. When Modeste went to her room to make her toilette, she looked at the jewelled whip she had disdained in the morning. "What workmanship they put into such things nowadays!" she said to Francoise Cochet, who had become her waiting-maid.
He took care to get from the director-general of the post-office a note to the postmaster at Havre, requesting secrecy and attention to his wishes. Ernest was thus enabled to see Francoise Cochet when she came for the letters, and to follow her without exciting observation. Guided by her, he reached Ingouville and saw Modeste Mignon at the window of the Chalet.
Madame des Aigues had forbidden Cochet to marry during her lifetime, with the selfishness often shown in all countries by a mistress to a maid; which is not more irrational than the mania for keeping possession, until our last gasp, of property that is utterly useless to our material comfort, at the risk of being poisoned by impatient heirs.
But in 1816 France was not, as it is now, lighted by a flaming publicity; the accomplices might safely count on dividing Les Aigues among them, that is, between Cochet, the notary, and Gaubertin, the latter of whom reserved to himself, "in petto," the intention of buying the others out for a sum down, as soon as the property fairly stood in his own name.
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