The second unnamed person, who seemed to be something between a master of rhetoric and a business agent, was of ordinary height, plump, but active withal.His face had the jovial expression which characterizes those of lawyers and notaries in Paris.
The dress of these four personages revealed a neatness due to the most scrupulous personal care.The same hand, and it was that of Manon, could be seen in every detail.Their coats were perhaps ten years old, but they were preserved, like the coats of vicars, by the occult power of the servant-woman, and the constant care with which they were worn.
These men seemed to wear on their backs the livery of a system of life; they belonged to one thought, their looks said the same word, their faces breathed a gentle resignation, a provoking quietude.
"Is it an indiscretion, madame," said Godefroid, "to ask the names of these gentlemen? I am ready to explain my life; can I know as much of theirs as custom will allow?""That gentleman," said Madame de la Chanterie, motioning to the tall, thin man, "is Monsieur Nicolas; he is a colonel of gendarmerie, retired with the rank of brigadier-general.And this," she added, looking towards the stout little man, "is a former councillor of the royal courts of Paris, who retired from the magistracy in 1830.His name is Monsieur Joseph.Though you have only been with us one day, Iwill tell you that in the world Monsieur Nicolas once bore the name of the Marquis de Montauran, and Monsieur Joseph that of Lecamus, Baron de Tresnes; but for us, as for the world, those names no longer exist.
These gentlemen are without heirs; they only advance by a little the oblivion which awaits their names; they are simply Monsieur Nicolas and Monsieur Joseph, as you will be Monsieur Godefroid."As he heard those names,--one so celebrated in the annals of royalism by the catastrophe which put an end to the uprising of the Chouans;the other so revered in the halls of the old parliament of Paris,--Godefroid could not repress a quiver.He looked at these relics of the grandest things of the fallen monarchy,--the /noblesse/ and the law,--and he could see no movement of the features, no change in the countenance, that revealed the presence of a worldly thought.Those men no longer remembered, or did not choose to remember, what they had been.This was Godefroid's first lesson.