Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/31

 “Monsieur Désiré?” replied the postilion, interrupting his master. “Eh! you must have heard us, our whips must have told you enough, we quite thought you were on the road.”

“Then why is the coach four hours late?”

“The tire of one of the back wheels fell off between Essonne and Ponthierry. But there was no accident; at the hill, Cabirolle happily noticed the matter.”

At this moment, a woman dressed in her Sunday clothes, for the pealing of the Nemours bell was summoning the inhabitants to the Sunday mass—a woman about thirty-six years old approached the postmaster.

“Well, cousin,” she said, “you never would believe me! Our uncle is in the Grand’Rue with Ursule and they are going to High Mass.”

In spite of the rules of modern poetry about local color, it is impossible to carry truth so far as to repeat the frightful abuse mingled with oaths that this news, apparently so little dramatic, called forth from Minoret-Levrault’s great mouth; his shrill voice hissed and his face presented the effect so ingeniously termed by the people, a Sunstroke.

“Are you sure?” he said after the first explosion of anger.

The postilions passed with their horses, saluting their master, who seemed neither to see nor to hear them. Instead of waiting for his son, Minoret-Levrault turned back up the Grand’Rue with his cousin.