fallen at Pavia, on that great day when all was lost _hormis l'honneur_; another had followed the white plume of the Bernais; another--but was there any need to tell of the glories of that house upon which Gustave was so eager to inflict the disgrace of a learned profession? Thus argued the father; but the mother had spent her girlhood amidst the clamour of the Buonapartist campaigns, and the thought of war was very terrible to her. The memory of the retreat from Russia was not yet twenty years old. There were men alive to tell the story, to depict those days and nights of horror, that mighty march of death. It was she and her daughter Cydalise who had helped to persuade Gustave that he was born to distinguish himself in the law. They wanted him to study in Paris--the young man himself had a wild desire to enjoy the delights of that wondrous capital--and to return in a few years to set up for himself as _avocat_ at the town of Vevinord, some half-dozen leagues from the patrimonial estate. He was created to plead for the innocent, to denounce the guilty, to be grand and brave and fiery-hot with enthusiasm in defence of virtuous peasants charged unjustly with the stealing of sheep, or firing of corn-ricks. It never struck these simple souls that he might sometimes be called upon to defend the guilty, or to denounce the innocent. It was all settled at last. Gustave was to go to Paris, and enter himself as a student of law. There were plenty of boarding-houses in the neighbourhood of the Ecole de Droit where a young man might find a home; and to one of these Gustave was recommended by a friend of his family. It was the Pension Magnotte to which they had sent him, the big dreary house, _entre cour et jardin_, which had once been so grand and noble. A printer now occupied the lower chambers, and a hand painted on the wall pointed to the _Pension Magnotte, au premier. Tirez le cordon, s.v.p._ Gustave was twenty-one years of age when he came to Paris; tall, stalwart, broad of shoulders and deep of chest, with a fair frank face, an auburn moustache, candid, kind blue eyes--a physiognomy rather Saxon than Celtic. He was a man who made friends quickly, and was soon at home among the students, roaring their favourite songs, and dancing their favourite dances at the dancing-places of that day, joining with a pleasant heartiness in all their innocent dissipations. For guilty dissipation the young provincial had no taste. Did he not carry the images of two kind and pure women about with him wherever he went, like two attendant angels ever protecting his steps; and could he leave them sorrowing on thresholds _they_ could not pass? Ah, no! He was loud and boisterous and wild of spirits in those early days, but incapable of meanness or vice. "It is a brave heart," Madame Magnotte said of him, "though for the breaking of glasses a scourge--_un fleau_."