of mine. Let him be taken care of. It is not his
fault." This manner of procedure was good-tempered. The woman, whose
name was Magnon, sent him another parcel in the following year. It was a
boy again. Thereupon, M. Gillenormand capitulated. He sent the two brats
back to their mother, promising to pay eighty francs a month for their
maintenance, on the condition that the said mother would not do so any
more. He added: "I insist upon it that the mother shall treat them well.
I shall go to see them from time to time." And this he did. He had had
a brother who was a priest, and who had been rector of the Academy of
Poitiers for three and thirty years, and had died at seventy-nine.
"I lost him young," said he. This brother, of whom but little memory
remains, was a peaceable miser, who, being a priest, thought himself
bound to bestow alms on the poor whom he met, but he never gave them
anything except bad or demonetized sous, thereby discovering a means of
going to hell by way of paradise. As for M. Gillenormand the elder, he
never haggled over his alms-giving, but gave gladly and nobly. He was
kindly, abrupt, charitable, and if he had been rich, his turn of mind
would have been magnificent. He desired that all which concerned him
should be done in a grand manner, even his rogueries. One day, having
been cheated by a business man in a matter of inheritance, in a gross
and apparent manner, he uttered this solemn exclamation: "That was
indecently done! I am really ashamed of this pilfering. Everything has
degenerated in this century, even the rascals. Morbleu! this is not the
way to rob a man of my standing. I am robbed as though in a forest, but
badly robbed. Silva, sint consule dignae!" He had had two wives, as
we have already mentioned; by the first he had had a daughter, who had
remained unmarried, and by the second another daughter, who had died
at about the age of thirty, who had wedded, through love, or chance,
or otherwise, a soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the
Republic and of the Empire, who had won the cross at Austerlitz and had
been made colonel at Waterloo. "He is the disgrace of my family,"
said the old bourgeois. He took an immense amount of snuff, and had a
particularly graceful manner of plucking at his lace ruffle with the
back of one hand. He believed very little in God.

CHAPTER VII--RULE: RECEIVE NO ONE EXCEPT IN THE EVENING

Such was M. Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost hi