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Updated: June 9, 2025
"Yes, that's so; you'll be Rigou's cats-paw!" cried Fourchon, who alone understood his grandson. Just then Langlume, the miller of Les Aigues, passed the tavern. Madame Tonsard hailed him. "Is it true," she said, "that gleaning is to be forbidden?" Langlume, a jovial white man, white with flour and dressed in grayish-white clothes, came up the steps and looked in.
The two weeks of the fair brought in a sort of harvest to the little town, for the festival has the authority and prestige of tradition. The peasants, as old Fourchon said, flocked in from the districts to which labor bound them for the rest of the year.
Fourchon grew very uneasy on seeing how his son-in-law's countenance softened as well as his words. "What do you want to rob me of now?" he asked, candidly. "I?" said Tonsard, "I take none but my legitimate dues; if I get anything from you it is in payment of your daughter's portion, which you promised me and never paid."
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.
"When a man of wit and intelligence is taken in by old Fourchon," continued the general, "a retired cuirassier need not blush for having hunted that otter; which bears an enormous resemblance to the third posthorse we are made to pay for and never see."
"My grandpa says it is made up to please the rich, and everybody knows later just what's in it." "The child is right, general," said Blondet; "and he makes me long to see my hoaxing friend again." Mouche understood perfectly that he was posing for the amusement of the company; the pupil of Pere Fourchon was worthy of his master, and he forthwith began to cry.
From teacher he became a postman. In this capacity, which serves as a refuge to many an old soldier, Pere Fourchon was daily reprimanded. Sometimes he forgot the letters in a tavern, at other times he kept them in his pocket. When he was drunk he left those for one village in another village; when he was sober he read them. Consequently, he was soon dismissed.
It was at Socquard's, in the middle of a dance; my grandfather, Fourchon, who was playing the clarionet, heard it and laughed. Tivoli seemed to me as grand and fine as heaven itself. It's lighted up, my dear, with glass lamps, and you'll think you are in paradise. All the gentlemen of Soulanges and Auxerre and Ville-aux-Fayes will be there.
"That's in Monsieur Rigou's newspaper," said Vaudoyer, who in his capacity of ex-field-keeper knew how to read and write; "I read it " In spite of his vinous tenderness, old Fourchon, like many of the lower classes whose faculties are stimulated by drunkenness, was following, with an intelligent eye and a keen ear, this curious discussion which a variety of asides rendered still more curious.
Besides, prisoners are better fed at the king's expense than they are at their own; and they're kept warmer, too." "You are a pack of fools!" roared Fourchon. "Better gnaw at the bourgeois than attack him in front; otherwise, you'll get your backs broke. If you like the galleys, so be it, that's another thing!
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