THE TWO BROTHERS
CHAPTER I
In 1792 the townspeople of Issoudun enjoyed the services of a
physician named Rouget, whom they held to be a man of consummate
malignity. Were we to believe certain bold tongues, he made his wife
extremely unhappy, although she was the most beautiful woman of the
neighborhood. Perhaps, indeed, she was rather silly. But the prying of
friends, the slander of enemies, and the gossip of acquaintances, had
never succeeded in laying bare the interior of that household. Doctor
Rouget was a man of whom we say in common parlance, "He is not
pleasant to deal with." Consequently, during his lifetime, his
townsmen kept silence about him and treated him civilly. His wife, a
demoiselle Descoings, feeble in health during her girlhood (which was
said to be a reason why the doctor married her), gave birth to a son,
and also to a daughter who arrived, unexpectedly, ten years after her
brother, and whose birth took the husband, doctor though he were, by
surprise. This late-comer was named Agathe.
These little facts are so simple, so commonplace, that a writer seems
scarcely justified in placing them in the fore-front of his history;
yet if they are not known, a man of Doctor Rouget's stamp would be
thought a monster, an unnatural father, when, in point of fact, he was
only following out the evil tendencies which many people shelter under
the terrible axiom that "men should have strength of character,"--a
masculine phrase that has caused many a woman's misery.
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