And Mme. Favoral tried to persuade herself, that, in this respect
at least, her husband was a remarkable man. She attributed his
silence and his distractions to the grave cares that filled his mind.
In the same manner that he had once announced to her that they had
enough to live on, she expected him, some fine morning, to tell her
that he was a millionaire.



IX

But the respite granted by fate to Mme. Favoral was drawing to an
end: her trials were about to return more poignant than ever,
occasioned, this time, by her children, hitherto her whole happiness
and her only consolation.

Maxence was nearly twelve. He was a good little fellow, intelligent,
studious at times, but thoughtless in the extreme, and of a
turbulence which nothing could tame.

At the Massin School, where he had been sent, he made his teachers'
hair turn white; and not a week went by that he did not signalize
himself by some fresh misdeed.

A father like any other would have paid but slight attention to the
pranks of a schoolboy, who, after all, ranked among the first of his
class, and of whom the teachers themselves, whilst complaining, said,

"Bash! What matters it, since the heart is sound and the mind sane?"