Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/34

 On the Gâtinais side, Nemours is overlooked by a hill, along which extends the road of Montargis and the Loing. The church, over whose stones time has spread its rich black cloak—for it was undoubtedly rebuilt in the fourteenth century by the Guises for whom Nemours was erected into a duchy-peerage, stands up at the end of the little town, enframed at the base of a great arch. For public buildings as for men, position is everything. Shaded by several trees, and thrown up by a neat square, this solitary church produced an imposing effect. In emerging on the square, the master of Nemours could see his uncle giving his arm to the young girl called Ursule, each holding a prayerbook and going into the church. The old man removed his hat in the porch, and his head, entirely white, like a snow-capped pinnacle, shone in the soft shadows of the façade.

“Well, Minoret, what do you say to your uncle’s conversion?” cried the tax-collector of Nemours, named Crémière.

“What would you have me say?” replied the postmaster, offering him a pinch of snuff.

“Well answered, père Levrault! you cannot say what you think, if a famous author was right in writing that man is obliged to think his words before speaking his thought,” maliciously cried a young man who had come up, and who, in Nemours, played the rôle of Mephistopheles in Faust.

This horrid fellow, called Goupil, was the head clerk of Monsieur Crémière-Dionis, the notary of