The heat of the afternoon had softened the cheeses; the patches of mould on their crusts were melting, and glistening with tints of ruddy bronze and verdigris. Beneath their cover of leaves, the skins of the Olivets seemed to be heaving as with the slow, deep respiration of a sleeping man. A Livarot was swarming with life; and in a fragile box behind the scales a Gerome flavoured with aniseed diffused such a pestilential smell that all around it the very flies had fallen lifeless on the gray-veined slap of ruddy marble.
This Gerome was almost immediately under Mademoiselle Saget’s nose; so she drew back, and leaned her head against the big sheets of white and yellow paper which were hanging in a corner.
“Yes,” she repeated, with an expression of disgust, “he comes from the galleys! Ah, those Quenu-Gradelles have no reason to put on so many airs!”
Madame Lecœur and La Sarriette, however, had burst into exclamations of astonishment: “It wasn’t possible, surely! What had he done to be sent to the galleys? Could anyone, now, have ever suspected that Madame Quenu, whose virtue was the pride of the whole neighbourhood, would choose a convict for a lover?”
“Ah, but you don’t understand at all!” cried the old maid impatiently. “Just listen, now, while I explain things. I was quite certain that I had seen that great lanky fellow somewhere before.”
Then she proceeded to tell them Florent’s story. She had recalled to mind a vague report which had circulated of a nephew of old Gradelle being transported to Cayenne for murdering six gendarmes at a barricade. She had even seen this nephew on one occasion in the Rue Pirouette. The pretended cousin was undoubtedly the same man. Then she began to bemoan her waning powers. Her memory was quite going, she said; she would soon be unable to remember anything. And she bewailed her perishing memory as bitterly as any learned man might bewail the loss of his notes representing the work of a life-time, on seeing them swept away by a gust of wind.
“Six gendarmes!” murmured La Sarriette, admiringly; “he must have a very heavy fist!”
“And he’s made away with plenty of others, as well,” added Mademoiselle Saget. “I shouldn’t advise you to meet him at night!”