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Updated: May 15, 2025
As Rigou crossed the Thune, fordable at all seasons, Tonsard came out of the tavern and met him on the high-road. "Well, Pere Rigou," he said, "so the Shopman means to make dogs of us?" "We'll see about that," said the usurer, whipping up his horse. "He'll protect us," said Tonsard, turning to a group of women and children who were near him.
The walnut wardrobe, the bedstead with the tester and curtains, and the ornaments about the bedroom were doubtless the result of the said laughter. Once in possession of his care, Tonsard replied to the first person who happened to mention that Mademoiselle Laguerre had given it to him, "I've bought it deuced hard, and paid well for it. Do rich folks ever give us anything?
"The damned abbe, of course," said Tonsard; "that hunter after sins, who thinks the host is food enough for us." "That's true," cried Vaudoyer; "we were happy enough till he came. We ought to get rid of that eater of the good God, he's the real enemy."
The wine produced by Tonsard's vineyard was sold in ordinary years for twenty francs a cask to a wine-dealer at Soulanges with whom Tonsard was intimate. In very prolific years he got as much as twelve casks from his vines; but eight was the average; and Tonsard kept half for his own traffic.
"If you choose to be a capitalist you can be," said Tonsard; "you have the means, you have! But the devil has bored a hole in the back of your head through which everything runs out." "Hey! I only played the otter trick on that young fellow they have got at Les Aigues. He's from Paris. That's all there is to it."
So saying, Fourchon rapped a five-franc piece that gleamed in his hand on the old table at which he was seated, which, with its coating of grease, its scorched black marks, its wine stains, and its gashes, was singular to behold. At the sound of coin Marie Tonsard, as trig as a sloop about to start on a cruise, glanced at her grandfather with a covetous look that shot from her eyes like a spark.
At the time when this history begins Tonsard, then about fifty years of age, tall and strong, rather stout than thin, with curly black hair, skin highly colored and marbled like a brick with purple blotches, yellow whites to the eyes, large ears with broad flaps, a muscular frame, encased, however, in flabby flesh, a retreating forehead, and a hanging lip, Tonsard, such as you see him, hid his real character under an external stupidity, lightened at times by a show of experience, which seemed all the more intelligent because he had acquired in the company of his father-in-law a sort of bantering talk, much affected by old Fourchon and Vermichel.
Fourchon, reassured by the harshness of this remark, dropped his head on his breast as though vanquished and convinced. "Look at that pretty snare," resumed Tonsard, coming up to his father-in-law and laying the trap upon his knee. "Some of these days they'll want game at Les Aigues, and we shall sell them their own, or there will be no good God for the poor folks."
Thus it happened that Tonsard was disappointed from the start in the hope he had indulged of increasing his comfort by an increase of property in marriage. The idle son-in-law had chanced, by a very common accident, on an idler father-in-law. Matters went all the worse because Tonsard's wife, gifted with a sort of rustic beauty, being tall and well-made, was not fond of work in the open air.
Hate, intelligence, and means at command, such were the three sides of the terrible triangle which describes the general's closest enemy, the spy ever watching Les Aigues, a shark having constant dealings with sixty to eighty small land-owners, relations or connections of the peasantry, who feared him as such men always fear their creditor. Rigou was in his way another Tonsard.
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