question of religious instruction. Through contact with her husband,
Madame Leroi had lost all belief, and her Protestant heredity inclining
her to free inquiry and examination, she had arranged for herself a kind
of peaceful atheism, based on paramount principles of human duty and
justice, which she applied courageously, irrespective of all social
conventionalities. The long iniquity of her husband's fate, the
undeserved misfortunes which struck her through him and her daughter,
ended by endowing her with wonderful fortitude and devotion, which made
her, whether as a judge, a manager, or a consoler, a woman of
incomparable energy and nobleness of character.

It was in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince that Guillaume became acquainted
with the Leroi family, after the war of 1870. On the same floor as their
little lodging he occupied a large room, where he devoted himself
passionately to his studies. At the outset there was only an occasional
bow, for Guillaume's neighbours were very proud and very grave, leading
their life of poverty in fierce silence and retirement. Then intercourse
began with the rendering of little services, such as when the young man
procured the ex-professor a commission to write a few articles for a new
encyclopaedia. But all at once came the catastrophe: Leroi died in his
armchair one evening while his daughter was wheeling him from his table
to his bed. The two distracted women had not even the money to bury him.
The whole secret of their bitter want flowed forth with their tears, and
they were obliged to accept the help of Guillaume, who, from that moment,
became the necessary confidant and friend. And the thing which was bound
to happen did happen, in the most simple and loving manner, permitted by
the mother herself, who, full of contempt for a social system which
allowed those of good hearts to die of hunger, refused to admit the
necessity of any social tie. Thus there was no question of a regular
marriage. One day Guillaume, who was twenty-three years old, found