raditions of the Rue Saint-Denis
furnished to her sister.

"The mischief is done, wife," said Joseph Lebas; "we must try to give
our sister good advice." Then the clever tradesman ponderously analyzed
the resources which law and custom might offer Augustine as a means
of escape at this crisis; he ticketed every argument, so to speak, and
arranged them in their degrees of weight under various categories, as
though they were articles of merchandise of different qualities; then he
put them in the scale, weighed them, and ended by showing the necessity
for his sister-in-law's taking violent steps which could not satisfy the
love she still had for her husband; and, indeed, the feeling had
revived in all its strength when she heard Joseph Lebas speak of
legal proceedings. Augustine thanked them, and returned home even more
undecided than she had been before consulting them. She now ventured
to go to the house in the Rue du Colombier, intending to confide her
troubles to her father and mother; for she was like a sick man who, in
his desperate plight, tries every prescription, and even puts faith in
old wives' remedies.

The old people received their daughter with an effusiveness that touched
her deeply. Her visit brought them some little change, and that to them
was worth a fortune. For the last four years they had gone their way
like navigators without a goal or a compass. Sitting by the chimney
corner, they would talk over their disasters under the old law of
_maximum_, of their great investments in cloth, of the way they had
weathered bankruptcies, and, above all, the famous failure of Lecocq,
Monsieur Guillaume's battle of Marengo. Then, when they had exhausted
the tale of lawsuits, they recapitulated the sum total of their most
profitable stock-takings, and told each other old stories of the
Saint-Denis quarter. At two o'clock old Guillaume went to cast an eye on
the business at the Cat and Racket; on his way back he called at all the
shops, formerly the rivals of his own, where the young proprietors hoped
to inveigle the old draper into some risky discount, which, as was his
wont, he never refused point-blank. Two good Normandy horses were dying
of their own fat in the stables of the big house; Madame Guillaume never
used them but to drag her on Sundays to high Mass at the parish church.
Three times a week the worthy couple kept open house. By the influence
of his son-in-law Sommervieux, Monsieur Guillaume had been name