Madame Massin's father, Levrault-Minoret,
had just died at Montereau after the battle, in despair at seeing his
farm burned, his fields ruined, his cattle slaughtered.
"We'll get nothing out of your great-uncle," said Massin to his wife,
now pregnant with her second child, after the interview.
The doctor, however, gave them privately ten thousand francs, with
which Massin, who was a great friend of the notary and of the sheriff,
began the business of money-lending, and carried matters so briskly
with the peasantry that by the time of which we are now writing Goupil
knew him to hold at least eighty thousand francs on their property.
As to his other niece, the doctor obtained for her husband, through
his influence in Paris, the collectorship of Nemours, and became his
bondsman. Though Minoret-Levrault needed no assistance, Zelie, his
wife, being jealous of the uncle's liberality to his two nieces, took
her ten-year old son to see him, and talked of the expense he would be
to them at a school in Paris, where, she said, education costs so
much. The doctor obtained a half-scholarship for his great-nephew at
the school of Louis-le-Grand, where Desire was put into the fourth
class.
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