Monsieur Lupin's son, Amaury, was a great trouble to his father.An only son, and one of the Don Juans of the valley, he utterly refused to follow the paternal profession.He took advantage of his position as only son to bleed the strong-box cruelly, without, however, exhausting the patience of his father, who would say after every escapade, "Well, I was like that in my young days." Amaury never came to Madame Soudry's; he said she bored him; for, with a recollection of her early days, she attempted to "educate" him, as she called it, whereas he much preferred the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de la Paix.He frequented the worst company of Soulanges, even down to Bonnebault.He continued sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry remarked, and replied to all his father's remonstrances with one perpetual request: "Send me back to Paris, for I am bored to death here."
Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was semi-conjugal.His known passion, in spite of his former liaison with Madame Sarcus, was for the wife of the under-sheriff of the municipal court,--Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer, who reigned in the second-class society as Madame Soudry did in the first.Monsieur Plissoud, a competitor of Brunet, belonged to the under-world of Soulanges on account of his wife's conduct, which it was said he authorized,--a report that drew upon him the contempt of the leading society.
If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon, the doctor, was its man of science.The town said of him, "We have here in our midst a scientific man of the first order." Madame Soudry (who believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini and Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera)
persuaded society, and even Lupin himself, that he might have made his fortune by his voice, and, in like manner, she was always regretting that the doctor did not publish his scientific ideas.