youth: modern society could have no other basis than heredity. An
ardent Catholic, like all men from the Comtat, he went to the earliest
morning masses, and thus concealed his piety. Like other
philanthropists, he practised a sordid economy, and gave to the poor
his time, his legal advice, his eloquence, and such money as he
extracted for them from the rich. His clothes, always of black cloth,
were worn until the seams became white. Nature had done a great deal
for Theodose in not giving him that fine manly Southern beauty which
creates in others an imaginary expectation, to which it is more than
difficult for a man to respond. As it was, he could be what suited him
at the moment,--an agreeable man or a very ordinary one. Never, since
his admission to the Thuilliers', had he ventured, till this evening,
to raise his voice and speak as dogmatically as he had risked doing to
Olivier Vinet; but perhaps Theodose de la Peyrade was not sorry to
seize the opportunity to come out from the shade in which he had
hitherto kept himself. Besides, it was necessary to get rid of the
young substitute, just as the Minards had previously ruined the hopes
of Monsieur Godeschal. Like all superior men (for he certainly had
some superiority), Vinet had never lowered himself to the point where
the threads of these bourgeois spider-webs became visible to him, and
he had therefore plunged, like a fly, headforemost, into the almost
invisible trap to which Theodose inveigled him.

To complete this portrait of the poor man's lawyer we must here relate
the circumstances of his first arrival at the Thuilliers'.

Theodose came to lodge in Mademoiselle Thuillier's house toward the
close of the year 1837. He had taken his degree about five years
earlier, and had kept the proper number of terms to become a
barrister. Circumstances, however, about which he said nothing, had