Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/83

 have a will for two, had always had enough for three,” Goupil used to say, and he called attention to the successive reigns of three tidy young postilions, each of whom had been set up by Zélie after seven years’ service. And so the malicious clerk called them Postilion I., Postilion II. and Postilion III. But the small amount of influence exercised by these young men in the house, and their perfect obedience proved that Zélie had been purely and simply interested in steady, good fellows.

“Well then, Zélie loves zeal,” replied the clerk to those who made such remarks to him.

This scandal was very improbable. Ever since the birth of her son, whom she had nursed herself without anyone being able to tell how, the postmistress had thought of nothing but increasing her fortune, and applied herself unceasingly to the management of her immense establishment. To steal a truss of straw or two or three bushels of oats, to deceive Zélie in the most complicated accounts was an impossibility although she wrote like a cat and knew no more arithmetic than addition and subtraction. She never went out except to measure her hay, her aftermaths and her oats; then she would send her husband to the harvest and her postilions to the binding, telling them, within a hundred pounds, the quantity that such and such a meadow should yield. Although she was the soul of that great fat body called Minoret-Levrault, and although she led him by the end of that absurdly turned-up