The rector, the chevalier, and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel had regularly passed their evenings for the last fifteen years at the hotel de Guenic, where the other noble personages of the neighborhood also came.  It will be readily understood that the du Guenics were at the head of the faubourg Saint-Germain of the old Breton province, where no member of the new administration sent down by the government was ever allowed to penetrate.  For the last six years the rector coughed when he came to the crucial words, Domine, salvum fac regem.  Politics were still at that point in Guerande.

IV

A NORMAL EVENING

Mouche is a game played with five cards dealt to each player, and one turned over.  The turned-over card is trumps.  At each round the player is at liberty to run his chances or to abstain from playing his card.  If he abstains he loses nothing but his own stake, for as long as there are no forfeits in the basket each player puts in a trifling sum.  If he plays and wins a trick he is paid pro rata to the stake; that is, if there are five sous in the basket, he wins one sou.  The player who fails to win a trick is made mouche; he has to pay the whole stake, which swells the basket for the next game.  Those who decline to play throw down their cards during the game; but their play is held to be null.  The players can exchange their cards with the remainder of the pack, as in ecarte, but only by order of sequence, so that the first and second players may, and sometimes do, absorb the remainder of the pack between them.  The turned-over trump card belongs to the dealer, who is always the last; he has the right to exchange it for any card in his own hand.  One powerful card is of more importance than all the rest; it is called Mistigris.  Mistigris is the knave of clubs.

This game, simple as it is, is not lacking in interest.  The cupidity natural to mankind develops in it; so does diplomatic wiliness; also play of countenance.  At the hotel du Guenic, each of the players took twenty counters, representing five sous; which made the sum total of the stake for each game five farthings, a large amount in the eyes of this company.  Supposing some extraordinary luck, fifty sous might be won,—­more capital than any person in Guerande spent in the course of any one day.  Consequently Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel put into this game (the innocence of which is only surpassed in the nomenclature of the Academy by that of La Bataille) a passion corresponding to that of the hunters after big game.  Mademoiselle Zephirine, who went shares in the game with the baroness, attached no less importance to it.  To put up one farthing for the chance of winning five, game after game, was to this confirmed hoarder a mighty financial operation, into which she put as much mental action as the most eager speculator at the Bourse expends during the rise and fall of consols.