young couple during their first year of wedlock, and all three of
them looked blooming. The business went on prosperously, without any
laborious fatigue, just as Lisa desired. She had carefully kept free of
any possible source of trouble or anxiety, and the days went by in an
atmosphere of peaceful, unctuous prosperity. Their home was a nook of
sensible happiness--a comfortable manger, so to speak, where father,
mother, and daughter could grow sleek and fat. It was only Quenu who
occasionally felt sad, through thinking of his brother Florent. Up to
the year 1856 he had received letters from him at long intervals. Then
no more came, and he had learned from a newspaper that three convicts
having attempted to escape from the Ile du Diable, had been drowned
before they were able to reach the mainland. He had made inquiries
at the Prefecture of Police, but had not learnt anything definite; it
seemed probable that his brother was dead. However, he did not lose
all hope, though months passed without any tidings. Florent, in the
meantime, was wandering about Dutch Guiana, and refrained from writing
home as he was ever in hope of being able to return to France. Quenu at
last began to mourn for him as one mourns for those whom one has been
unable to bid farewell. Lisa had never known Florent, but she spoke
very kindly whenever she saw her husband give way to his sorrow; and
she evinced no impatience when for the hundredth time or so he began to
relate stories of his early days, of his life in the big room in the
Rue Royer Collard, the thirty-six trades which he had taken up one after
another, and the dainties which he had cooked at the stove, dressed all
in white, while Florent was dressed all in black. To such talk as this,
indeed, she listened placidly, with a complacency which never wearied.

It was into the midst of all this happiness, ripening after careful
culture, that Florent dropped one September morning just as Lisa was
taking her matutinal bath of sunshine, and Quenu, with his eyes still