Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/71



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Very soon this trio became a quartette. Another man to whom life was known, and who to the habit of business owed that forbearance, that knowledge, that mass of observation, that shrewdness, and that talent for conversation which the soldier, the doctor and the curé owed to experience of souls, sick people and a profession—the justice of the peace sniffed the pleasures of these evenings and sought the doctor’s society. Before becoming justice of the peace at Nemours, Monsieur Bongrand had been solicitor for ten years at Melun, where he pleaded himself, according to the custom of towns where there is no bar. Becoming a widower at forty-five, he still felt too active to be idle; so he had applied for the justiceship of the peace of Nemours, which was vacant some months before the doctor’s instalment. The Keeper of the Seals is always glad to find practitioners, and especially people who are well off, to hold this important magistracy. Monsieur Bongrand lived modestly at Nemours upon the fifteen hundred francs from his post, and was thus able to devote his income to his son, who was reading for the bar at Paris, while studying jurisprudence under the famous solicitor Derville. Father Bongrand somewhat resembled an old retired head-clerk; he had a face that was not so much pale