Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/60

 and who had been the first to venture to tell him of their hard situation. Massin and his wife were not rich. Massin’s father, a locksmith at Montargis, obliged to compound with his creditors, at sixty-seven years of age was working like a young man, and would leave nothing. Madame Massin’s father, Levrault-Minoret, had just died at Montereau, from the effects of war, having seen his farm burnt, his fields ruined and his cattle consumed.

“We shall get nothing from your great-uncle,” said Massin to his wife, who was already pregnant with her second child.

The doctor secretly gave them ten thousand francs, with which the clerk of the justice of the peace, a friend of the notary and sheriff of Nemours, started usury and went to work so thoroughly with the peasants of the vicinity, that just now Goupil knew him to be worth eighty thousand francs in unacknowledged capital.

As for his other niece, the doctor, through his connections in Paris, obtained the collectorship of Nemours for Crémière and guaranteed the security. Although Minoret-Levrault was in need of nothing, Zélie, jealous of the uncle’s liberality to his two nieces, introduced her son to him, who was then ten years old, and whom she was going to send to a college in Paris, where, she said, education was very expensive. As he was physician at Fontanes, the doctor obtained a half-scholarship at the college of Louis-le-Grand for his great-nephew, who was placed in the fourth class.