d occupations (about which we shall hear
later), all based upon the character of the man himself, as to which it
will now be useful to give information.

Though the son of a ministerial porter, Thuillier was what is called a
fine man, slender in figure, above middle height, and possessing a
face that was rather agreeable if wearing his spectacles, but frightful
without them; which is frequently the case with near-sighted persons;
for the habit of looking through glasses has covered the pupils of his
eyes with a sort of film.

Between the ages of eighteen and thirty, young Thuillier had much
success among women, in a sphere which began with the lesser bourgeois
and ended in that of the heads of departments. Under the Empire, war
left Parisian society rather denuded of men of energy, who were mostly
on the battlefield; and perhaps, as a great physician has suggested,
this may account for the flabbiness of the generation which occupies the
middle of the nineteenth century.

Thuillier, forced to make himself noticeable by other charms than those
of mind, learned to dance and to waltz in a way to be cited; he was
called "that handsome Thuillier"; he played billiards to perfection; he
knew how to cut out likenesses in black paper, and his friend Colleville
coached him so well that he was able to sing all the ballads of the
day. These various small accomplishments resulted in that appearance
of success which deceives youth and befogs it about the future.
Mademoiselle Thuillier, from 1806 to 1814, believed in her brother as
Mademoiselle d'Orleans believed in Louis-Philippe. She was proud of
Jerome; she expected to see him the director-general of his department
of the ministry, thanks to his successes in certain salons, where,
undoubtedly, he would never have been admitted but for the circumstances
which made society under the Empire a medley.

But the successes of "that handsome Thuillier" were usually of short
duration; women did not care to keep his devotion any more than he
desired to make his devotion eternal. He was really an unwilling Don
Juan; the career of a "beau" wearied him to the point of aging him; his
face, covered with lines like that of an old coquette, looked a dozen
years older than the registers made him. There remained to him of all
his successes in gallantry, a habit of looking at himself in mirrors, of
buttoning his coat to define his waist, and of posing in various dancing
attitudes; all of which prol