her in one of those damp, dark, low rooms which serve as
homes for the French peasantry. Treated thus, the features of the
children coarsened; their voices grew harsh; they mortified their
mother's vanity, and that made her strive to correct their bad habits
by a sternness which the severity of their father converted through
comparison to kindness. As a general thing, they were left to run loose
about the stables and courtyards of the inn, or the streets of the town;
sometimes they were whipped; sometimes they were sent, to get rid of
them, to their grandfather Auffray, who did not like them. The injustice
the Rogrons declared the old man did to their children, justified them
to their own minds in taking the greater part of "the old scoundrel's"
property. However, Rogron did send his son to school, and did buy him a
man, one of his own cartmen, to save him from the conscription. As soon
as his daughter, Sylvie, was thirteen, he sent her to Paris, to make
her way as apprentice in a shop. Two years later he despatched his son,
Jerome-Denis, to the same career. When his friends the carriers and
those who frequented the inn, asked him what he meant to do with his
children, Pere Rogron explained his system with a conciseness which, in
view of that of most fathers, had the merit of frankness.

"When they are old enough to understand me I shall give 'em a kick and
say: 'Go and make your own way in the world!'" he replied, emptying his
glass and wiping his lips with the back of his hand. Then he winked at
his questioner with a knowing look. "Hey! hey! they are no greater fools
than I was," he added. "My father gave me three kicks; I shall only
give them one; he put one louis into my hand; I shall put ten in theirs,
therefore they'll be better off than I was. That's the way to do. After
I'm gone, what's left will be theirs. The notaries can find them and
give it to them. What nonsense to bother one's self about children. Mine
owe me their life. I've fed them, and I don't ask anything from them,--I
call that quits, hey, neighbor? I began as a cartman, but that didn't
prevent me marrying the daughter of that old scoundrel Auffray."

Sylvie Rogron was sent (with six hundred francs for her board) as
apprentice to certain shopkeepers originally from Provins and now
settled in Paris in the rue Saint-Denis. Two years later she was "at
par," as they say; she earned her own living; at any rate her parents
paid nothing for her. That is w