Marechal was the lawyer whom his former patron, when buying Les Aigues for the general, had recommended to Monsieur de Montcornet as legal adviser.

Sibilet, eldest son of the clerk of the court at Ville-aux-Fayes, a notary’s clerk, without a penny of his own, and twenty-five years old, had fallen in love with the daughter of the chief-magistrate of Soulanges.  The latter, named Sarcus, had a salary of fifteen hundred francs, and was married to a woman without fortune, the eldest sister of Monsieur Vermut, the apothecary of Soulanges.  Though an only daughter, Mademoiselle Sarcus, whose beauty was her only dowry, could scarcely have lived on the salary paid to a notary’s clerk in the provinces.  Young Sibilet, a relative of Gaubertin, by a connection rather difficult to trace through family ramifications which make members of the middle classes in all the smaller towns cousins to each other, owed a modest position in a government office to the assistance of his father and Gaubertin.  The unlucky fellow had the terrible happiness of being the father of two children in three years.  His own father, blessed with five, was unable to assist him.  His wife’s father owned nothing beside his house at Soulanges and an income of two thousand francs.  Madame Sibilet the younger spent most of her time at her father’s home with her two children, where Adolphe Sibilet, whose official duty obliged him to travel through the department, came to see her from time to time.

Gaubertin’s exclamation, though easy to understand from this summary of young Sibilet’s life, needs a few more explanatory details.

Adolphe Sibilet, supremely unlucky, as we have shown by the foregoing sketch of him, was one of those men who cannot reach the heart of a woman except by way of the altar and the mayor’s office.  Endowed with the suppleness of a steel-spring, he yielded to pressure, certain to revert to his first thought.  This treacherous habit is prompted by cowardice; but the business training which Sibilet underwent in the office of a provincial notary had taught him the art of concealing this defect under a gruff manner which simulated a strength he did not possess.  Many false natures mask their hollowness in this way; be rough with them in return and the effect produced is that of a balloon collapsed by a prick.  Such was Sibilet.  But as most men are not observers, and as among observers three fourths observe only after a thing has taken place, Adolphe Sibilet’s grumbling manner was considered the result of an honest frankness, of a capacity much praised by his master, and of a stubborn uprightness which no temptation could shake.  Some men are as much benefited by their defects as others by their good qualities.