The lawyer was half beside himself at the approaching scandal.

What would the neighbors say?
Well, to cut the story short, the infant was suppressed,--you understand, suppressed, and the mother turned into the street." "Baptiste, have mercy!" "It was a most imprudent act, for such things always leak out somehow.
You have a gardener at your house at Champigny, and suppose the idea seized upon this worthy man to dig up the ground round the wall at the end of the garden." "That is enough," said Catenac, piteously.

"I give in." Mascarin adjusted his spectacles, as he always did in important moments.
"You give in, do you?
Not a bit.

Even now you are endeavoring to find a means of parrying my home thrusts." "But I declare to you----" "Do not be alarmed; dig as deeply as he might, your gardener would discover nothing." The lawyer uttered a stifled exclamation of rage as he perceived the pit into which he had fallen.
"He would find nothing," resumed Mascarin, "and yet the story is all true.

Last January, on a bitterly cold night, you dug a hole, and in it deposited the body of a new-born infant wrapped in a shawl.