The dowdy little wife
of M. Pelissier, who had first seen the light in some grubby
suburb of Paris, either Levallois-Perret or Clichy, held an
immense position in Nyons on the strength of being "une vraie
Parisienne," and most questions of taste were referred to her. M.
Sisteron, the collector of taxes, himself a native of Nyons, had
twenty years before gone to Paris on business, and spent four days
there. There were the darkest rumours current in Nyons, to the
effect that M. Sisteron had spent these four days in a whirl of
the most frantic and abandoned dissipation. It was popularly
supposed that these four days in Paris, twenty years ago, had so
completely unsettled M. Sisteron that life in Nyons had lost all
zest for him. He was perpetually hungering for the delirious joys
of the metropolis; even the collection of taxes no longer afforded
him the faintest gratification. Every inhabitant of Nyons was
secretly proud of being able to claim so dare-devil a roysterer as
a fellow-townsman. The memory of those rumored four hectic days in
Paris clung round him like a halo; it became almost a pleasure to
pay taxes to so celebrated a character.
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