When Maxence wanted two or three napoleons, he had but a word to say; and he said it often. Thus, after a while, he became an excellent billiard-player; he kept his colored meerschaum in the rack of a popular brewery; he took absinthe before dinner, and spent his evenings in the laudable effort to ascertain how many mugs of beer he could “put away.” Gaining in audacity, he danced at Bullier’s, dined at Foyd’s, and at last had a mistress. So much so, that one afternoon, M. Favoral having to visit on business the other side of the water, found himself face to face with his son, who was coming along, a cigar in his mouth, and having on his arm a young lady, painted in superior style, and harnessed with a toilet calculated to make the cab-horses rear. He returned to the Rue St. Gilles in a state of indescribable rage. “A woman!” he exclaimed in a tone of offended modesty. “A woman! --he, my son!” And when that son made his appearance, looking quite sheepish, his first impulse was to resort to his former mode of correction. But Maxence was now over nineteen years of age. At the sight of the uplifted cane, he became whiter than his shirt; and, wrenching it from his father’s hands, he broke it across his knees, threw the pieces violently upon the floor, and sprang out of the house. “He shall never again set his foot here!” screamed the cashier of the Mutual Credit, thrown beside himself by an act of resistance which seemed to him unheard of. “I banish him. Let his clothes be packed up, and taken to some hotel: I never want to see him again.” For a long time Mme. Favoral and Gilberte fairly dragged themselves at his feet, before he consented to recall his determination. “He will disgrace us all!” he kept repeating, seeming unable to understand that it was himself who had, as it were, driven Maxence on to the fatal road which he was pursuing, forgetting that the absurd severities of the father prepared the way for the perilous indulgence of the mother, unwilling to own that the head of a family has other duties besides providing food and shelter for his wife and children, and that a father has but little right to complain who has not known how to make himself the friend and the adviser of his son. At last, after the most violent recriminations, he forgave, in appearance at least. But the scales had dropped from his eyes. He started in quest of information, and discovered startling enormities. He heard from M. Chapelain that Maxence remained whole weeks at a time without appearing at the office. If he had not complained before, it was because he had yielded to the urgent entreaties of Mme. Favoral; and he was now glad, he added, of an opportunity to relieve his conscience by a full confession.