of any kind; she loved her father and mother, and would
willingly sacrifice herself for their sake. Brought up to the deepest
admiration for her godfather by Brigitte (who taught her to say "Aunt
Brigitte"), and by Madame Thuillier and her own mother, Celeste imbibed
the highest idea of the ex-beau of the Empire. The house in the rue
Saint-Dominique d'Enfer produced upon her very much the effect of the
Chateau des Tuileries on a courtier of the new dynasty.

Thuillier had not escaped the action of the administrative rolling-pin
which thins the mind as it spreads it out. Exhausted by irksome toil, as
much as by his life of gallantry, the ex-sub-director had well-nigh
lost all his faculties by the time he came to live in the rue
Saint-Dominique. But his weary face, on which there still reigned an air
of imperial haughtiness, mingled with a certain contentment, the conceit
of an upper official, made a deep impression upon Celeste. She alone
adored that haggard face. The girl, moreover, felt herself to be the
happiness of the Thuillier household.

CHAPTER IV. THE CIRCLE OF MONSIEUR AND MADAME THUILLIER

The Collevilles and their children became, naturally, the nucleus of the
circle which Mademoiselle Thuillier had the ambition to group around
her brother. A former clerk in the Billardiere division of the ministry,
named Phellion, had lived for the last thirty years in their present
quarter. He was promptly greeted by Colleville and Thuillier at the
first review. Phellion proved to be one of the most respected men in the
arrondissement. He had one daughter, now married to a school-teacher in
the rue Saint-Hyacinthe, a Monsieur Barniol. Phellion's eldest son was
a professor of mathematics in a royal college; he gave lectures and
private lessons, being devoted, so his father was wont to say, to pure
mathematics. A second son was in the government School of Engineering.
Phellion had a pension of nine hundred francs, and he possessed a little
property of nine thousand and a few odd hundred francs; the fruit of his
economy and that of his wife during thirty years of toil and privation.
He was, moreover, the owner of a little house and garden where he lived
in the "impasse" des Feuillantines,--in thirty years he had never used
the old-fashioned word "cul-de-sac"!

Dutocq, the clerk of the justice of peace, was also a former employee
at the ministry of finance. Sacrificed, in former days, to one of those
necessities which