“Ninety—forty. … During this time, Lecœur was telling all the girls
in the Quartier des Carreaux that he had done the deed, and the
keepers of disorderly houses were bringing to the police-inspector
Madame Houssieu’s earrings, chain, and rings that the butcher-boy
had distributed among their inmates. This Lecœur, like so many other
murderers, gave himself up. But Roquincourt, in a rage, left Sieurin,
or Pied-d’Alouette, in solitary confinement. He is still there.
Ninety-nine … and one hundred.”
“Splendid!” said M. _le préfet_ Worms-Clavelin.
“So,” murmured M. Delion, “this woman of eighty-three had still … It is
incredible!”
But Dr. Fornerol, agreeing with President Peloux’s opinion, declared
that the case was not as unusual as they fancied, and he supplied the
physiological explanation, which was listened to with interest. Then
he went on to quote different cases of sexual aberrations and wound up
in these words:
“If the devil on two sticks, lifting us up in the air, were to raise
the roofs of the town before our eyes, we should see appalling sights,
and we should be staggered at the discovery among our fellow-citizens
of so many maniacs, degenerates, mad men and mad women.”
“Bah!” said M. Worms-Clavelin, the _préfet_, “one must not look too
closely into that. All these people, taken one by one, are perhaps what
you say; but together they form a superb mass of constituents and a
splendid county-town population for the department.”
Now, on the raised divan which overlooked the billiard-table, Senator
Laprat-Teulet sat caressing his long white beard. He had the majesty of
a river.
“For my part,” said he, “I can only believe in goodness. Wherever I
cast my eyes, I see virtue and honesty. I have been able to prove
by numerous instances that the morals of the French women since the
Revolution leave nothing to be desired, especially in the middle
classes.”
“I am not so optimistic,” replied M. de Terremondre, “but I certainly
did not suspect that Queen Marguerite’s house hid such shameful
mysteries behind its walls of crumbling woodwork and beneath the
cobweb-curtains of its mullioned windows. I went to see Madame Houssieu
several times; she seemed to me a miserly and mistrustful old woman, a
little mad, yet like so many others. But, as they used to say in the
time of Queen Marguerite:
“She is under the sod.
Her soul be with God![M]
She will no longer, by her lewdness, blot the scutcheon of good
Philippe Tricouillard.”
[M] “Elle est sous lame.
Dieu ait son âme!”
At that name a shout of merry laughter burst from their knowing faces.
It was the secret joy and inward pride of the town, that emblematic
shield, with its witness to the triple virtue and power that put this
bourgeois ancestor of theirs on a level with the great condottiere
of Bergamo. The people of ... loved him, their lusty forebear, the
contemporary of the king in the _Cent Nouvelles nouvelles_, their
ancient alderman Philippe Tricouillard, about whom, to tell the
truth, they knew nothing save the gift of nature to which he owed his
illustrious surname.
The turn taken by the conversation led Dr. Fornerol to say that several
instances had been cited of a similar anomaly, and that certain writers
declare that at times this honourable monstrosity is transmitted
hereditarily and becomes persistent in a family. Unluckily the line of
the worthy Philippe had been extinct for more than two hundred years.
After this remark, M. de Terremondre, who was president of the
Archæological Society, related a true anecdote.
“Our departmental archivist,” said he, “the learned M. Mazure, has
recently discovered in the garrets of the prefecture some documents
relating to a charge of adultery, brought, at the very period when
Philippe Tricouillard was flourishing, towards the end of the fifteenth
century, by Jehan Tabouret against Sidoine Cloche, his wife, for the
reason that the aforesaid Sidoine, having had three children at a
birth, Sieur Jehan Tabouret only acknowledged two of them as his, and
maintained that the third was by another man, for he averred that he
was constitutionally incapable of begetting more than two at a time.
And he gave a reason for this, founded on an error then common among
matrons, barber-surgeons, and apothecaries, who each as eagerly as
the others professed to believe that the normal frame of a man was
physiologically incapable of begetting more than twins, and that all
over the number of pledges which the father can produce should be
disowned. For this reason, poor Sidoine was convicted by the judge of
having played the harlot, and for this put naked on an ass, with her
head towards the tail, and thus led through the town to the pond at
Les Evés, where she was ducked three times. She would scarcely have
suffered thus if her wicked husband had been as generously gifted by
Dame Nature as good Philippe Tricouillard.”