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Updated: June 27, 2025
M. le Cure Gondin, as he was generally called at Granpere, being always so spoken of, with his full name and title, by the large Protestant portion of the community, was a man very much respected by all the neighbourhood.
His mind was full of painful thoughts as he went, and as the little animal ran quickly down the mountain road into the valley in which Granpere lies, he almost wished that his feet were not so fleet. What was he to say when he got to Granpere, and to whom was he to say it? When he reached the angular court along two sides of which the house was built he did not at once enter the front door.
For some four- and-twenty hours, during which he had thought himself to be ill- used, and had meditated a retreat from Granpere, he had contrived to teach himself that he might possibly live without her; but as soon as he was accepted, and when the congratulations of the men and women of Granpere were showered down upon him in quick succession, so that the fact that the thing was to be became assured to him, he soon came to fancy again that he was a man as successful in love as he was in the world's good, and that this acquisition of Marie's hand was a treasure in which he could take delight.
English readers will perhaps remember that among the Vosges mountains there is less of a sense of privacy attached to bedrooms than is the case with us here in England. Marie knew immediately then that her cousin had not come to Granpere for nothing, had not come with the innocent intention of simply pleasing his father, had not come to say an ordinary word of farewell to her before her marriage.
'If you think that the house is worth anything, I will give you a few thousand francs to set it in order; and then you had better agree to allow her so much a year for her life. He probably felt himself to be nearly as young a man as his son; and then remember too that he had other sons coming up, who would be able to carry on the house at Granpere when he should be past his work.
Now, when Madame Faragon learned that Michel Voss and Adrian Urmand had gone through Colmar back from Basle on their way to Granpere, she immediately foresaw what was to happen. Marie's marriage was to be hurried on, George was to be thrown overboard, and the pedlar's pack was to be triumphant over the sign of the innkeeper.
The bridge and the river and the ravine are very pretty, and perhaps justify all that the villagers say of them when they sing to travellers the praises of their country. Whether it be the sale of linen that has produced the large inn at Granpere, or the delicious air of the place, or the ravine and the bridge, matters little to our story; but the fact of the inn matters very much.
He found himself to have been taken in, from first to last, by the whole household, and he would at this moment have been glad to obliterate Granpere altogether from among the valleys of the Vosges. And so he went to bed in his wrath. Michel and Madame Voss sat below waiting for him above an hour. Madame Voss more than once proposed that she should go up and see what was happening.
He told himself again and again that he could not make her marry him if she chose to change her mind. What was he to say, and what was he to do when he got to Granpere, a place which he almost wished that he had never seen in spite of those profitable linen-buyings?
Of the wood-cutting and the saw-mill George knew as much as Marie did of the poultry and the linen. Michel was wrong, probably, in his attempt to separate them. The house was large enough, or if not, there was still room for another house to be built in Granpere. They would have done well as man and wife.
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