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.