It became the fashion--a fashion which lasted half a dozen years at least--to call that Christmas the Martinbault Christmas; so loudly did those who were present at that famous examination, and the discovery which attended it, profess that it exceeded all the other amusements of the year, not excepting even the great ball at the Palais Cardinal, from which every lady carried off an _étrenne_ worth a year's pin-money. The story became the rage. Those who had been present drove their friends, who had not been so fortunate, to the verge of madness. From the court the tale spread to the markets. Men made a broadsheet of it, and sold it in the streets--in the Rue Touchet, and under the gallows at Montfaucon, where the body of Solomon Nôtredame withered in the spring rains. Had Madame de Vidoche and the child stayed in Paris, it must have offended their ears ten times a day.
[Illustration: "A MAN HALF-NAKED ... CRAWLED ON TO THE HIGHROAD" (_p_. 212).]
But they did not. As soon as madame could be moved, she retired with the boy to the old house four leagues from Perigueux, and there, in the quiet land where the name of Martinbault ranked with the name of the king, she sought to forget her married life. She took her maiden title, and in the boy's breeding, in works of mercy, in a hundred noble and fitting duties entirely to her taste, succeeded in finding peace, and presently happiness. But one thing neither time, nor change, nor in the event love, could erase from her mind; and that was a deep-seated dread of the great city in which she had suffered so much. She never returned to Paris.
About a year after the trial a man with crafty, foxy eyes came wandering through Perigueux, with a monkey on his shoulder. He saw not far from the road--as his evil-star would have it--an old château standing low among trees. The place promised well, and he went to it and began to perform before the servants in the courtyard. Presently the lord of the house, a young boy, came out to see him.
More need not be said, save that an hour later a man, half naked, covered with duckweed, and aching in every bone, crawled on to the highroad, and went on his way in sadness--with his mouth full of curses; and that for years afterwards a monkey, answering to the name of Taras, teased the dogs, and plucked the ivy, and gambolled at will on the great south terrace at Martinbault.