Page:Stories by Foreign Authors (French I).djvu/40

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UNCLE AND NEPHEW.
39

you know. With a touch of charlatanism, he could have made a fortune; he was satisfied to make his expenses. He avoided notoriety, and whenever he attained a marvellous cure, he did not proclaim it from the housetops. His reputation made itself, and almost in spite of him. His treatise on Monomanie raisonnante, which he published through Baillière in 1842, is in its sixth edition without the author having sent a single copy to the papers. Modesty is certainly good in itself, but it ought not to be carried to an extreme. Mlle. Auvray has not more than twenty thousand francs dowry, and she will be twenty-two years old in April.

About a fortnight ago (it was, I think, on Wednesday, December 13th), a cab stopped before M. Auvray's gate. The driver rang, and the gate was opened. The carriage went on to the doctor's house, and two men briskly entered his office. The servant begged them to sit down and wait till the doctor had finished his rounds. It was ten o'clock in the morning.

One of the strangers was a man of fifty, large, brown, full-blooded, of high color, passably ugly, and specially ill-made; his ears were pierced, his hands large, and his thumbs enormous. Fancy a workman dressed in his employer's clothes: such is M. Morlot.

His nephew, François Thomas, is a young man of twenty-three, hard to describe, because he is