The Deputy of Arcis | Page 9

cheat.'"
"Poor France! where are they leading you?" cried the colonel; "I shall
go back to my roses."
"Oh, stay, father! You are the keystone of the arch."

III
OPPOSITION DEFINES ITSELF
The mayor, Monsieur Phileas Beauvisage, was the first to present
himself, accompanied by the successor of his father-in-law, the busiest
notary in town, Achille Pigoult, grandson of an old man who had

continued justice of the peace in Arcis during the Revolution, the
Empire, and the Restoration. Achille Pigoult, thirty-two years of age,
had been eighteen years a clerk in Grevin's office with no means of
becoming himself a notary. His father, son of the justice of peace, had
died of a so-called apoplexy, having gone wrong in business.
The Comte de Gondreville, however, with whom old Pigoult had
relations dating back to 1793, lent money for the necessary security,
and thus enabled the grandson of the judge who made the first
examination in the Simeuse case to buy the practice of his master,
Grevin. Achille had set up his office in the Place de l'Eglise, in a house
belonging to the Comte de Gondreville, which the latter had leased to
him at so low a price that any one could see how desirous that crafty
politician was to hold the leading notary of Arcis in the hollow of his
hand.
Young Pigoult, a short, skinny man, whose eyes seemed to pierce the
green spectacles which could not modify the spitefulness of his glance,
well-informed as to all the interests of the neighborhood, owing his
aptitude in managing affairs to a certain facility of speech, passed for
what is called a /quizzer/, saying things plainly and with more
cleverness than the aborigines could put into their conversations. Still a
bachelor, he was awaiting a rich marriage through the offices of his two
protectors, Grevin and the Comte de Gondreville. Consequently,
barrister Giguet was not a little surprised on seeing Achille appear at
the meeting in company with Monsieur Phileas Beauvisage.
The notary, whose face was so seamed by the smallpox that it seemed
to be covered with a white net, formed a perfect contrast to the rotund
person of the mayor, whose face resembled a full moon, but a warm
and lively moon; its tones of lily and of rose being still further
brightened by a gracious smile, the result not so much of a disposition
of the soul as of that formation of the lips for which the word
"simpering" seems to have been created. Phileas Beauvisage was
endowed with so great a contentment with himself that he smiled on all
the world and under all circumstances. Those simpering lips smiled at a
funeral. The liveliness that abounded in his infantine blue eyes did not
contradict that perpetual and well-nigh intolerable smile.
This internal satisfaction passed all the more readily for benevolence
and affability, because Phileas had made himself a language of his own,

remarkable for its immoderate use of the formulas of politeness. He
always "had the honor"; to all his inquiries as to the health of absent
persons he added the adjectives "dear," "good," "excellent." He
lavished condoling or congratulatory phrases apropos of all the petty
miseries and all the little felicities of life. He concealed under a deluge
of commonplaces his native incapacity, his total want of education, and
a weakness of character which can only be expressed by the old word
"weathercock." Be not uneasy: the weathercock had for its axis the
beautiful Madame Beauvisage, Severine Grevin, the most remarkable
woman in the arrondissement.
When Severine heard of what she called her husband's "freak" as to the
election, she said to him on the morning of the meeting at Madame
Marion's:--
"It was well enough to give yourself an air of independence; but you
mustn't go to that Giguet meeting unless Achille Pigoult accompanies
you; I've told him to come and take you."
Giving Achille Pigoult as mentor to Beauvisage meant sending a spy
from the Gondreville party to the Giguet assemblage. We may therefore
imagine the grimace which contracted the puritan visage of Simon,
who was forced to welcome graciously an /habitue/ of his aunt's salon
and an influential elector, in whom, nevertheless, he saw an enemy.
"Ah!" he thought to himself, "what a mistake I made in refusing him
that security when he asked for it! Old Gondreville had more sense than
I--Good-day to you, Achille," he said, assuming a jaunty manner; "I
suppose you mean to trip me up."
"Your meeting isn't a conspiracy against the independence of our
votes," replied the notary, smiling. "We are all playing above-board, I
take it."
"Above-board," echoed Beauvisage.
And the mayor began to laugh with that expressionless laugh by which
some persons end all their sentences; which may, perhaps, be called the
/ritornello/ of