our sister good advice." Then the clever tradesman ponderously
analyzed the resources which law and custom might offer Augustine as a
means of escape at this crisis; he ticketed every argument, so to
speak, and arranged them in their degrees of weight under various
categories, as though they were articles of merchandise of different
qualities; then he put them in the scale, weighed them, and ended by
showing the necessity for his sister-in-law's taking violent steps
which could not satisfy the love she still had for her husband; and,
indeed, the feeling had revived in all its strength when she heard
Joseph Lebas speak of legal proceedings. Augustine thanked them, and
returned home even more undecided than she had been before consulting
them. She now ventured to go to the house in the Rue du Colombier,
intending to confide her troubles to her father and mother; for she
was like a sick man who, in his desperate plight, tries every
prescription, and even puts faith in old wives' remedies.

The old people received their daughter with an effusiveness that
touched her deeply. Her visit brought them some little change, and
that to them was worth a fortune. For the last four years they had
gone their way like navigators without a goal or a compass. Sitting by
the chimney corner, they would talk over their disasters under the old
law of _maximum_, of their great investments in cloth, of the way they
had weathered bankruptcies, and, above all, the famous failure of
Lecocq, Monsieur Guillaume's battle of Marengo. Then, when they had
exhausted the tale of lawsuits, they recapitulated the sum total of
their most profitable stock-takings, and told each other old stories
of the Saint-Denis quarter. At two o'clock old Guillaume went to cast
an eye on the business at the Cat and Racket; on his way back he
called at all the shops, formerly the rivals of his own, where the
young proprietors hoped to inveigle the old draper into some risky