“It is not the expense that I deplore,” he replied, “but the
duplicity. I am rich enough, thank Heaven! not to begrudge a few
francs; and I would gladly give to my wife twice as much as she takes,
if she would only ask it frankly.”
But that was a lesson.
Hereafter he was careful to dissimulate, and seemed exclusively
occupied in subjecting his son to a system of his invention, the
excessive rigor of which would have upset a steadier one than he.
He demanded of him daily written attestations of his attendance both
at the law-school and at the lawyer’s office. He marked out the
itinerary of his walks for him, and measured the time they required,
within a few minutes. Immediately after dinner he shut him up in
his room, under lock and key, and never failed, when he came home
at ten o’clock to make sure of his presence.
He could not have taken steps better calculated to exalt still more
Mme. Favoral’s blind tenderness.
When she heard that Maxence had a mistress, she had been rudely
shocked in her most cherished feelings. It is never without a secret
jealousy that a mother discovers that a woman has robbed her of her
son’s heart. She had retained a certain amount of spite against him
on account of disorders, which, in her candor, she had never
suspected. She forgave him every thing when she saw of what
treatment he was the object.
She took sides with him, believing him to be the victim of a most
unjust persecution. In the evening, after her husband had gone out,
Gilberte and herself would take their sewing, sit in the hall outside
his room, and converse with him through the door. Never had they
worked so hard for the shop-keeper in the Rue St. Denis. Some weeks
they earned as much as twenty-five or thirty francs.
But Maxence’s patience was exhausted; and one morning he declared
resolutely that he would no longer attend the law-school, that he
had been mistaken in his vocation, and that there was no human power
capable to make him return to M. Chapelain’s.
“And where will you go?” exclaimed his father. “Do you expect me
eternally to supply your wants?”
He answered that it was precisely in order to support himself, and
conquer his independence, that he had resolved to abandon a
profession, which, after two years, yielded him twenty francs a month.
“I want some business where I have a chance to get rich,” he replied.
“I would like to enter a banking-house, or some great financial
establishment.”
Mme. Favoral jumped at the idea.
“That’s a fact,” she said to her husband. “Why couldn’t you find
a place for our son at the Mutual Credit? There he would be under
your own eyes. Intelligent as he is, backed by M. de Thaller and
yourself, he would soon earn a good salary.”