"A woman!" he exclaimed in a tone of offended modesty. "A woman!
--he, my son!"

And when that son made his appearance, looking quite sheepish, his
first impulse was to resort to his former mode of correction.

But Maxence was now over nineteen years of age.

At the sight of the uplifted cane, he became whiter than his shirt;
and, wrenching it from his father's hands, he broke it across his
knees, threw the pieces violently upon the floor, and sprang out
of the house.

"He shall never again set his foot here!" screamed the cashier of
the Mutual Credit, thrown beside himself by an act of resistance
which seemed to him unheard of. "I banish him. Let his clothes be
packed up, and taken to some hotel: I never want to see him again."

For a long time Mme. Favoral and Gilberte fairly dragged themselves
at his feet, before he consented to recall his determination.

"He will disgrace us all!" he kept repeating, seeming unable to
understand that it was himself who had, as it were, driven Maxence
on to the fatal road which he was pursuing, forgetting that the
absurd severities of the father prepared the way for the perilous
indulgence of the mother, unwilling to own that the head of a
family has other duties besides providing food and shelter for his
wife and children, and that a father has but little right to
complain who has not known how to make himself the friend and the
adviser of his son.

At last, after the most violent recriminations, he forgave, in
appearance at least.

But the scales had dropped from his eyes. He started in quest of
information, and discovered startling enormities.

He heard from M. Chapelain that Maxence remained whole weeks at a
time without appearing at the office. If he had not complained
before, it was because he had yielded to the urgent entreaties of
Mme. Favoral; and he was now glad, he added, of an opportunity to
relieve his conscience by a full confession.

Thus the cashier discovered, one by one, all his son's tricks. He
heard that he was almost unknown at the law-school, that he spent
his days in the cafes, and that, in the evening, when he believed
him in bed and asleep, he was in fact running out to theatres and
to balls.

"Ah! that's the way, is it?" he thought. "Ah, my wife and children
are in league against me,--me, the master. Very well, we'll see."

XI

From that morning war was declared.

From that day commenced in the Rue St. Gilles one of those dome