From this moment Monsieur Roubaud attached himself so deeply to Madame Graslin that he became afraid of loving her beyond the permitted line of simple friendship.  The brow, the bearing, above all, the glance of Veronique’s eye had a sort of eloquence that men invariably understand; it said as plainly that she was dead to love as other women say the contrary by a reversal of the same eloquence.  The doctor suddenly vowed to her, in his heart, a chivalrous worship.

He exchanged a rapid glance with the rector, who thought to himself, “Here’s the thunderbolt which will convert my poor unbeliever; Madame Graslin will have more eloquence than I.”

The mayor, an old countryman, amazed at the luxury of this dining-room and surprised to find himself dining with one of the richest men in the department, had put on his best clothes, which rather hampered him, and this increased his mental awkwardness.  Moreover, Madame Graslin in her mourning garments seemed to him very imposing; he was therefore mute.  After living all his life as a farmer at Saint-Leonard, he had bought the only habitable house in Montegnac and cultivated with his own hands the land belonging to it.  Though he knew how to read and write, he would have been incapable of fulfilling his functions were it not for the help of his clerk and the juge de paix, who prepared his work for him.  He was very anxious to have a notary established in Montegnac, in order that he might shift the burden of his responsibility on to that officer’s shoulders.  But the poverty of the village and its outlying districts made such a functionary almost useless, and the inhabitants had recourse when necessary to the notaries of the chief town of the arrondissement.

The juge de paix, named Clousier, was formerly a lawyer in Limoges, where cases had deserted him because he insisted on putting into practice that fine axiom that the lawyer is the best judge of the client and the case.  In 1809 he obtained his present post, the meagre salary of which just enabled him to live.  He had now reached a stage of honorable but absolute poverty.  After a residence of twenty-one years in this poor village the worthy man, thoroughly countrified, looked, top-coat and all, exactly like the farmers about him.

Under this coarse exterior Clousier hid a clear-sighted mind, given to lofty meditation on public policy, though he himself had fallen into a state of complete indifference, derived from his intimate knowledge of men and their interests.  This man, who baffled for a long time the rector’s perspicacity and who might in a higher sphere have proved another l’Hopital, incapable of intrigue like all really profound persons, was by this time living in the contemplative state of an ancient hermit.  Independent through privation, no personal consideration acted on his mind; he knew the laws and judged impartially.  His life, reduced to the merest necessaries, was pure and regular.  The peasants loved Monsieur Clousier and respected him for the disinterested fatherly care with which he settled their differences and gave them advice in their daily affairs.  The “goodman Clousier” as all Montegnac called him, had a nephew with him as clerk, an intelligent young man, who afterwards contributed much to the prosperity of the district.