cried in a voice of
thunder:--

"Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII.!"

Louis XVIII. had been dead for four years; but it was all the same to
him.

The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than his hair. He
wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry, which stood on the
chimney-piece, and made a profound bow, with a sort of peculiar majesty.
Then he paced twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace to the
window and from the window to the fireplace, traversing the whole length
of the room, and making the polished floor creak as though he had been a
stone statue walking.

On his second turn, he bent over his daughter, who was watching this
encounter with the stupefied air of an antiquated lamb, and said to her
with a smile that was almost calm: "A baron like this gentleman, and a
bourgeois like myself cannot remain under the same roof."

And drawing himself up, all at once, pallid, trembling, terrible, with
his brow rendered more lofty by the terrible radiance of wrath, he
extended his arm towards Marius and shouted to him:--

"Be off!"

Marius left the house.

On the following day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter:

"You will send sixty pistoles every six months to that blood-drinker,
and you will never mention his name to me."

Having an immense reserve fund of wrath to get rid of, and not knowing
what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter as you instead
of thou for the next three months.

Marius, on his side, had gone forth in indignation. There was one
circumstance which, it must be admitted, aggravated his exasperation.
There are always petty fatalities of the sort which complicate domestic
dramas. They augment the grievances in such cases, although, in reality,
the wrongs are not increased by them. While carrying Marius' "duds"
precipitately to his chamber, at his grandfather's command, Nicolette
had, inadvertently, let fall, probably, on the attic staircase, which
was dark, that medallion of black shagreen which contained the paper
penned by the colonel. Neither paper nor case could afterwards be found.
Marius was convinced that "Monsieur Gillenormand"--from that day forth
he never alluded to him otherwise--had flung "his father's testament" in
the fire. He knew by heart the few lines which the colonel had written,
and, consequently, nothing was lost. But the paper, the writing, that
sacred relic,--all that was his very heart. What had b