Reine-Claude,
which was in the hands of the notary who had managed the transmission of
the maintenance money to young Clemenceau. At the hint from M. Ritz, who
had a debt of honor to pay the son of his dead friend, the house was
rented at a nominal sum. Here Felix, as he boldly described himself by
right, though the name had a tinge of mockery, installed himself with
his bride. He had a portfolio of architectural sketches soon completed
and, thanks to the fellowship to which his name might exercise a spell,
all the old artists who had known his father, helped him manfully.
Luckily, there was something markedly novel in his work.

His odd training helped him. He came from the Polish University into an
unromantic society which, after its stirring up by the Great Revolution,
was so levelled and amalgamated that everybody resembled his neighbor as
well in manners and speech as in attire. Strong characters, heated
passions, black vices, deep prejudices, grievous misfortunes, and even
utterly ridiculous persons had disappeared. The country he had been
reared in still thrilled with patriotism and meant something when it
muttered threats to kill its tyrant--meant so much that the Czar did not
pass through a Polish town until the police and military had "ensured an
enthusiastic reception." But in France, tyrants and love of country were
mere words to draw applause from the country cousins in a popular
theatre.

Felix, though a youth, stood a head and shoulders above the level of the
weaklings excluded as "finished" from these commonplace educational
institutions--schools called colleges and colleges called universities,
resulting necessarily from the proclamation of man's equality. He
sickened at seeing the neutral-tinted lake of society, with
"shallow-swells," more painful to the right-minded than an ocean in a
tempest.

He soon became like the French, but not so his wife. She suffered the
change of her unpronounceable name, being euphonized as "Cesarine,"
smilingly, but life at home in a demure and tranquil suburb little
suited the young meteor who had flashed across Germany. Felix saw with
dismay that domestic bliss was not that which she enjoyed. For a while
he hoped that she would content herself as his helpmate and the genius
of the hearth when a mother.

But maternity had nothing but thorns for her. She chafed under the
burden and her joy was indecent when the little boy died. Until then he
had believed that the pat