Every Sunday he dined with his neighbours the Mesdemoiselles Helbivore.

His old age was cheerful and robust and his friends often praised the amenity of his character.
For some months, however, he had been irritable and touchy, and when he opened a newspaper his broad and ruddy face would become covered with dolorous wrinkles and darkened with an angry purple.

Pyrot was the cause of it.

Justice Chaussepied could not understand how an officer could have committed so black a crime as to hand over eighty thousand trusses of military hay to a neighbouring and hostile Power.

And he could still less conceive how a scoundrel should have found official defenders in Penguinia.