his superiors. At the epoch of which we write, you would have noticed
in him the coldly resigned air of one who has buried the illusions of
his youth and renounced every secret ambition; you would have
recognized a discouraged, but not disgusted man, one who still clings
to his first projects,--more perhaps to employ his faculties than in
the hope of a doubtful success. He was not decorated with any order,
and always accused himself of weakness for having worn that of the
Fleur-de-lis in the early days of the Restoration.

The life of this man was marked by certain mysterious peculiarities.
He had never known his father; his mother, a woman to whom luxury was
everything, always elegantly dressed, always on pleasure bent, whose
beauty seemed to him miraculous and whom he very seldom saw, left him
little at her death; but she had given him that too common and
incomplete education which produces so much ambition and so little
ability. A few days before his mother's death, when he was just
sixteen, he left the Lycee Napoleon to enter as supernumerary a
government office, where an unknown protector had provided him with a
place. At twenty-two years of age Rabourdin became under-head-clerk;
at twenty-five, head-clerk, or, as it was termed, head of the bureau.
From that day the hand that assisted the young man to start in life
was never felt again in his career, except as to a single
circumstance; it led him, poor and friendless, to the house of a
Monsieur Leprince, formerly an auctioneer, a widower said to be
extremely rich, and father of an only daughter. Xavier Rabourdin fell
desperately in love with Mademoiselle Celestine Leprince, then
seventeen years of age, who had all the matrimonial claims of a dowry
of two hundred thousand francs. Carefully educated by an artistic
mother, who transmitted her own talents to her daughter, this young
lady was fitted to attract distinguished men. Tall, handsome, and