Gaubertin, who discovered during the excitement of the scene (which lasted more than two hours) the difficulties in which the general would soon be involved, jumped on his pony after leaving the room where the quarrel took place, and galloped to Soulanges to consult the Soudrys.At his first words, "The general and I have parted; whom can we put in my place without his suspecting it?" the Soudrys understood their friend's wishes.Do not forget that Soudry, for the last seventeen years chief of police of the canton, was doubly shrewd through his wife, an adept in the particular wiliness of a waiting-
maid of an Opera divinity.
"We may go far," said Madame Soudry, "before we find any one to suit the place as well as our poor Sibilet."
"Made to order!" exclaimed Gaubertin, still scarlet with mortification."Lupin," he added, turning to the notary, who was present, "go to Ville-aux-Fayes and whisper it to Marechal, in case that big fire-eater asks his advice."
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.
Adeline Sarcus, a pretty young woman, brought up by a mother (who died three years before her marriage) as well as a mother can educate an only daughter in a remote country town, was in love with the handsome son of Lupin, the Soulanges notary.At the first signs of this romance, old Lupin, who intended to marry his son to Mademoiselle Elise Gaubertin, lost no time in sending young Amaury Lupin to Paris, to the care of his friend and correspondent Crottat, the notary, where, under pretext of drawing deeds and contracts, Amaury committed a variety of foolish acts, and made debts, being led thereto by a certain Georges Marest, a clerk in the same office, but a rich young man, who revealed to him the mysteries of Parisian life.By the time Lupin the elder went to Paris to bring back his son, Adeline Sarcus had become Madame Sibilet.In fact, when the adoring Adolphe offered himself, her father, the old magistrate, prompted by young Lupin's father, hastened the marriage, to which Adeline yielded in sheer despair.
The situation of clerk in a government registration office is not a career.It is, like other such places which admit of no rise, one of the many holes of the government sieve.Those who start in life in these holes (the topographical, the professorial, the highway-and-
canal departments) are apt to discover, invariably too late, that cleverer men then they, seated beside them, are fed, as the Opposition writers say, on the sweat of the people, every time the sieve dips down into the taxation-pot by means of a machine called the budget.
Adolphe, working early and late and earning little, soon found out the barren depths of his hole; and his thoughts busied themselves, as he trotted from township to township, spending his salary in shoe-leather and costs of travelling, with how to find a permanent and more profitable place.