Since those days he had become a dark morose figure, living apart from men, never going to confession, seldom going to Mass, unloving and unlovable.
There was only one other person in the parish more unloved.

That was the woman called Paulette Dubois, who lived in the little house at the outer gate of the Manor.

Paulette Dubois had a bad name in the parish--so bad that all women shunned her, and few men noticed her.

Yet no one could say that at the present time she did not live a careful life, justifying, so far as eye could see, the protection of the Seigneur, M.Rossignol, a man of queer habits and queerer dress, a dabbler in physical science, a devout Catholic, and a constant friend of the Cure.
He it was who, when an effort was made to drive Paulette out of the parish, had said that she should not go unless she wished; that, having been born in Chaudiere, she had a right to live there and die there; and if she had sinned there, the parish was in some sense to blame.

Though he had no lodge-gates, and though the seigneury was but a great wide low-roofed farmhouse, with an observatory, and a chimney-piece dating from the time of Louis the Fourteenth, the Seigneur gave Paulette Dubois a little hut at his outer gate, which had been there since the great Count Frontenac visited Chaudiere.