To come in the capacity of a cousin, and seat himself every day at a good table; to smooth the yellow, wrinkled brow of the old procurator; to pluck the clerks a little by teaching them BASSETTE, PASSE-DIX, and LANSQUENET, in their utmost nicety, and winning from them, by way of fee for the lesson he would give them in an hour, their savings of a month—all this was enormously delightful to Porthos.
The Musketeer could not forget the evil reports which then prevailed, and which indeed have survived them, of the procurators of the period—meanness, stinginess, fasts; but as, after all, excepting some few acts of economy which Porthos had always found very unseasonable, the procurator's wife had been tolerably liberal—that is, be it understood, for a procurator's wife—he hoped to see a household of a highly comfortable kind.