19, properly modernized with nice curtains and mirrors and equipped with a hand-picked staff, had acquired such an excellent reputation that they had to increase the number of women to six. Army officers, local government officials, in a word the cream of Chartres society, would never dream of patronizing any other establishment. And this successful start was maintained thanks to Monsieur Charles's iron hand and firm, fatherly management; whilst Madame Charles showed extraordinary energy in keeping her eye on everything and ensuring that nothing went astray, although she knew when to turn a blind eye at petty thefts committed by her richer customers.

In less than twenty-five years, the Badeuils accumulated more than 300,000 francs in savings and they then thought that they might realize their lifelong dream of an idyllic old age in the depths of the country among trees, birds and flowers. But they were unable to realize their dream for another two years because they could not find anyone prepared to pay the high price that they had set on No. 19. It was really heartbreaking: here was an establishment to which they had devoted the best years of their lives and they now found themselves forced to let it pass into unknown hands where it might well go downhill. As soon as he first arrived in Chartres, Monsieur Charles had had a daughter, Estelle, whom he sent to school with the Sisters of the Visitation in Châteaudun when he set up in the Rue aux Juifs. It was a pious convent, very strong on moral upbringing, and he left his daughter there until she was eighteen to ensure her total innocence; she spent all her holidays far away from Chartres and never learnt how she came to be so wealthy. And he removed her from the convent only at the time of her marriage to a young excise officer, Hector Vaucogne, a good-looking young man whose sterling qualities were marred by inordinate laziness. She was nearly thirty and had a little girl, Elodie, who was seven, when, having finally learnt the truth and hearing that her father wanted to retire from the business, she asked him, of her own accord, for the first refusal. Why should such a splendid gilt-edged concern go out of the family? Everything was settled, the Vaucognes took over the establishment and by the very first month the Badeuils were delighted and touched to see that their daughter, albeit brought up with quite different ideals, showed herself a very gifted bawdy-house keeper, thus making up for the inertia and total lack of managerial skills of her husband. The parents had retired five years ago to Rognes, where they could look after their granddaughter Éodie, who had been sent in her turn to the convent of the Sisters of the Visitation in Châteaudun to receive a religious education in accordance with the strictest principles of Christian morality.

When Monsieur Charles came into the kitchen where a young maid was beating an omelette and keeping an eye on a pan full of larks frying in butter, they all doffed their hats, even Delhomme and old Fouan, and appeared greatly gratified to shake the hand he offered them.

‘My word,’ said Grosbois, making himself agreeable, ‘what a nice property you have here, Monsieur Charles. And when you think that you got it for a song! Yes, you're a very smart man, Monsieur Charles, a really smart man.’

Monsieur Charles smirked.

‘A bit of luck, sheer chance. We decided we liked it and Madame Charles was so keen to end her days in the village where she was born… You know, where sentiment is involved, I've never been able to say no.’

Roseblanche, which was the name of the property, was the folly of a rich citizen of Cloyes who had just spent nearly fifty thousand francs on it when he was struck down by an apoplexy even before the paint had dried. The house was extremely elegant, set halfway up the hill in nearly eight acres of garden sloping down to the Aigre. In such a dreary village on the edge of the dismal plain of Beauce, there were no buyers and Monsieur Charles had picked it up for twenty thousand francs. Here he was able to satisfy, in uninterrupted bliss, his every taste: superb trout and eels caught in the river, lovingly cultivated collections of roses and carnations, and finally birds, a vast aviary full of wild singing birds of all sorts of which he took sole care. The affectionate old couple lived there on their twelve thousand francs a year, in a state of unruffled happiness which he regarded as the just reward of his thirty years of work.

‘Isn't that right,’ Monsieur Charles added, ‘at least people here know who we are?’

‘Yes, of course, people know you,’ replied the surveyor. ‘Your money sees to that.’

And all the others nodded approval.

‘Certainly, certainly.’

Then Monsieur Charles told the maid to set out some glasses and he himself went down into the cellar to fetch a couple of bottles of wine. They all sniffed the delicious smell of the larks frying in the pan. And they solemnly drank, rolling the wine round their mouths.

‘Goodness me, that doesn't come from these parts! Really lovely!’

‘Another drop, your very good health.’

‘And yours too!’

As they put down their glasses Madame Charles appeared, a respectable-looking lady of sixty-two, with snow-white hair drawn tightly back from her face; she had the heavy features and big nose of the Fouans, but they were combined with a fresh pink complexion, like that of a gentle old nun who has spent her life in cloistered seclusion. Her twelve-year-old granddaughter, Elodie, who was spending a couple of days' holiday in Rognes, followed her into the room, looking scared and shy as she clung awkwardly to her grandmother's skirts. She was a pallid, plain little girl with a flabby, puffy face and pale wispy hair, a bloodless little creature who was moreover repressed by the virginal innocence of her upbringing to the point of idiocy.

‘Well, well, it's you,’ said Madame Charles to her brother and her nephews, without enthusiasm, as she slowly offered them an aloof and rather lordly hand.

And then, swinging round and paying them no further attention:

‘Do come in, Monsieur Patoir… Here he is…’

Patoir was the veterinary surgeon from Cloyes, a short, stout, sanguine man, with a military-looking purple face and large mustachios. He had just arrived in his muddy cabriolet in the pouring rain.

‘This poor little pet,’ she went on, pulling out of the warm oven a basket containing a dying cat, ‘this poor little pet started trembling all over yesterday and so I wrote to you… Oh, he's not young, he's almost fifteen… We had him with us in Chartres for ten years and last year my daughter had to get rid of him because he kept forgetting himself all over the shop, and I brought him here.’

‘Shop’ was in deference to Elodie, who had been told that her parents kept a confectioner's shop which took up so much of their time that they were unable to have her to stay with them. Moreover, the others did not even smile because the word was current in Rognes, where people used to say that ‘the Hourdequins' farm didn't bring in as much as Monsieur Charles's shop’. And they looked wide-eyed at the skinny, yellow, wretched old cat which had lost all its fur; the cat who had purred its way through every single bed in the Rue aux Juifs, tickled and fondled by the plump hands of five or six generations of loose women. For so many years he had been pampered as a favourite pet, at home in the parlour and in the bedrooms, licking up left-over face-cream, drinking out of the toothglasses, a silent, meditative observer of all that was happening as he watched through his narrow pupils ringed with gold.

‘So, Monsieur Patoir,’ Madame Charles concluded, ‘I want you to cure him, please.’

The veterinary surgeon stared with wide-open eyes, wrinkling his nose and lips with a grimace on his cheerful, coarse, puglike face. He exclaimed:

‘What on earth! That's what you fetched me out for? Of course, I can cure him for you. Tie a stone round his neck and chuck him in the river!’

Élodie burst into tears while Madame Charles choked with indignation.

‘But your little pussy is smelling to high heaven! How can anyone want to keep such a dreadful animal and give the whole house cholera? Chuck him in the river!’

But in the face of the old lady's wrath, he finally sat down and wrote out a prescription, grumbling the while:

‘All right then, if you enjoy this sort of stench… What's it to me as long as I get paid? Here you are: stick a spoonful of that into his mouth every hour and here's a prescription for two enemas, one tonight, the other tomorrow.’

For the last few minutes, Monsieur Charles had been growing restless because he could see the larks becoming overcooked while the maid, bored with beating the omelette, was standing there with her arms dangling. So he quickly handed Patoir the six-franc fee for his consultation and invited the others to drink up.

‘It's lunchtime.