This little flat of six rooms on the second floor at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue Lesdiguières, had been occupied by Mme. Derize only since her son's marriage. She had then believed that her task was finished, and so retreated to the neighborhood of the tombs. Until then, on Albert's account, she had lived in the newer neighborhood near Saint-André Square: young men need scenes of activity and movement, and not quiet streets and reminders of death. When she saw him in a new home and realized that he was attracted to and even taken possession of by the Molay-Norrois set, who were proud of his growing fame, she returned quite naturally to the cemetery which contained her happiness and her youth. There rested her parents, to whom she owed this strength of resistance which results from a happy childhood, her husband whom she had lost after only four years of married life and whose memory still persisted after thirty-six years. It seemed to her as if she had not formerly had time to mourn him sufficiently, and that she was now paying a debt; as old age comes on, we have need of warmth and sunshine, and we recall both from the best days we have spent. He had been cut off at the height of his power by a crushing accidental illness, just as he was completing the building of one of those factories operated by the "white coal" which is making the fortune of Dauphiné to-day. Without a diploma he proved himself to be a pioneer. Albert's was the third attempt at prominence in the Derize family: the grandfather had already been stricken down before he found success. Thus families often present incomplete sketches of the descendant who will do them honor, or are impeded in their normal development by adverse fate, and do not succeed in flowering.