Few cared to anger the little man, whose father and grandfather had been notaries here before him.
Like others in the settlement, Shangois was the last of his race.

He could put his finger upon the secret history and private lives of nearly every person in a dozen parishes, but most of all in Bonaventure--for such this long parish was called.

He knew to a hair's breadth the social value of every human being in the parish.

He was too cunning and acute to be a gossip, but by direct and indirect ways he made every person feel that the Cure and the Lord might forgive their pasts, but he could never forget them, nor wished to do so.

For Monsieur Duhamel, the old seigneur, for the drunken Philippe Casimbault, for the Cure, and for the Lavilettes, who owned the great farmhouse at the apex of that wedge of village life, he had a profound respect.