wound from the republican army. Nature had meant M. Chardon senior for
a chemist; chance opened the way for a retail druggist's business in
Angouleme. After many years of scientific research, death cut him off
in the midst of his incompleted experiments, and the great discovery
that should have brought wealth to the family was never made. Chardon
had tried to find a specific for the gout. Gout is a rich man's
malady; the rich will pay large sums to recover health when they have
lost it, and for this reason the druggist deliberately selected gout
as his problem. Halfway between the man of science on the one side and
the charlatan on the other, he saw that the scientific method was the
one road to assured success, and had studied the causes of the
complaint, and based his remedy on a certain general theory of
treatment, with modifications in practice for varying temperaments.
Then, on a visit to Paris undertaken to solicit the approval of the
_Academie des Sciences_, he died, and lost all the fruits of his labors.

It may have been that some presentiment of the end had led the country
druggist to do all that in him lay to give his boy and girl a good
education; the family had been living up to the income brought in by
the business; and now when they were left almost destitute, it was an
aggravation of their misfortune that they had been brought up in the
expectations of a brilliant future; for these hopes were extinguished
by their father's death. The great Desplein, who attended Chardon in
his last illness, saw him die in convulsions of rage.

The secret of the army surgeon's ambition lay in his passionate love
for his wife, the last survivor of the family of Rubempre, saved as by
a miracle from the guillotine in 1793. He had gained time by declaring
that she was pregnant, a lie told without the girl's knowledge or
consent. Then, when in a manner he had created a claim to call her his