And this time, as always, the reading of these lines plunged M. Bergeret into melancholy. Whilst he was immersed in it, the bookseller, M. Paillot, confronted a little soldier, who had come in to buy a sou’s worth of letter-paper, with disdain and hauteur. “I don’t keep letter-paper,” declared M. Paillot, turning his back on the little soldier. Then he complained of his assistant, Léon, who was always on errands, and who, once gone out, never came back. Consequently he, Paillot, was constantly being pestered by intruders. They actually asked him for letter-paper! “I remember,” said Dr. Fornerol to him, “that one market-day a good country-woman came in and asked you for a plaster, and that you had the greatest difficulty in preventing her from tucking up her petticoats and showing you the painful spot where the paper was to be applied.” Paillot, the bookseller, replied to this anecdotic sally by a silence which expressed offended dignity. “Heavens!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre, the book-lover, “this learned storehouse of our Fröben, our Elzevir, our Debure, confused with the chemist’s shop of Thomas Diafoirus! What an outrage!” “Indeed,” replied Dr. Fornerol, “the good soul meant no harm in showing Paillot the seat of her trouble. But it won’t do to judge the peasants by her. In general, they show extreme repugnance to letting themselves be seen by the doctor. My country colleagues have often remarked this to me. Country-women, attacked by serious diseases, resist examination with an energy and obstinacy which townswomen, and particularly women of the world, do not show in the same circumstances. I saw a farmer’s wife at Lucigny die of an internal tumour, which she had never allowed to be suspected.” M. de Terremondre, who, as president of several local academies, had literary prejudices, took these remarks as a pretext for accusing Zola of having shamefully maligned the peasants in _La Terre_. At this accusation, M. Bergeret emerged from his pensive sadness and said: “Yet the peasants are drunkards and parricides, and voluntarily incestuous, as Zola has depicted them. Their repugnance to lend themselves to clinical inspection by no means proves their chastity. It only shows the power of prejudice in minds of limited intelligence. The simpler a prejudice is, the stronger is its power. The prejudice that it is wrong to be seen naked remains powerful with them. It has been weakened amongst artists and people of intelligence by the custom of baths, douches, and massage; it has been still further weakened by æsthetic feeling and by the taste for voluptuous sensations, and it easily yields to considerations of health and hygiene. This is all that can be deduced from the doctor’s observations.” “I have noticed,” said M. de Terremondre, “that well-made women …” “There are hardly any,” said the doctor.