No, that which enticed the scion of Sauvagnat, who was far more
ambitious than greedy, was the Academie. The two great courtyards which
he had to cross to bring his daily offering of flowers, and the long
solemn corridors into which at intervals there descended a dusty
staircase, were for him rather the path of glory than of love. The
Paulin Rehu of the Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the Jean Rehu of
the 'Letters to Urania,' the Institute complete with its lions and its
cupola--this was the Mecca of his pilgrimage, and all this it was that
he took to wife on his wedding day.

For this not transient beauty he felt a passion proof against the
tooth of time, a passion which took such hold of him that his permanent
attitude towards his wife was that of those mortal husbands on whom, in
the mythological age, the gods occasionally bestowed their daughters.
Nor did he quit this respect when at the fourth ballot he had himself
become a deity. As for Madame Astier, who had only accepted marriage as
a means of escape from a hard and selfish grandfather in his anecdotage,
it had not taken her long to find out how poor was the laborious peasant
brain, how narrow the intelligence, concealed by the solemn manners of
the Academic laureate and manufacturer of octavos, and by his voice with
its ophicleide notes adapted to the sublimities of the lecture room. And
yet when, by force of intrigue, bargaining, and begging, she had seated
him at last in the Academie, she felt herself possessed by a certain
veneration, forgetting that it was herself who had clothed him in that
coat with the green palm leaves, in which his nothingness ceased to be
visible.

In the dull concord of their partnership, where was neither joy, nor
intimacy, nor communion of any kind, there was but one single note of
natural human feeling, their child; and this note disturbed the harmony.
In the first place the father was entirely disappointed of all that he
wished for his son, that he should be distinguished by the University,
entered for the general examinations, and finally pass through the Ecole
Normale to a professorship. Alas! at school Paul took prizes for nothing
but gymnastics and fencing, and distinguished himself chiefly by a
wilful and obstinate perversity, which covered a practical turn of mind
and a precocious understanding of the world. Careful of his dress and
his appearance, he never went for a walk without the hope, of which he
made no secret to h