Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/42

 principles. He spoke like a man who suffers from loss of voice. In short, in order to portray him, it suffices to say that he employed his eldest daughter and his wife to make copies of the trials.

Madame Crémière was a stout woman with doubtful yellow hair, a complexion covered with freckles, a little too tightly squeezed into her dresses, was connected with Madame Dionis, and passed as well-informed because she read novels. This financier of the lowest order, full of pretensions to wit and beauty, was waiting for her uncle’s inheritance to take up a certain style, to decorate her salon and there receive the bourgeoisie; for her husband refused to give her the Carcel lamps, the lithographs and the useless knickknacks she saw at the house of the notary’s wife. She had an excessive dread of Goupil, who used to watch for and hawk about her capsulinguettes—her rendering of the word lapsus linguæ.—One day, Madame Dionis was saying she did not know what water to use for her teeth.

“Take an opiate,” she replied.

Nearly all the collateral heirs of old Doctor Minoret now found themselves assembled in the square, and the importance of the event which was stirring them up was so generally felt, that the groups of peasants, armed with their red umbrellas, all clothed in the dazzling colors which make them so picturesque on fête days on the roads, had their eyes upon the Minoret heirs. In the little towns which are something between the big boroughs and the cities, those who do not go to mass remain in the square.