Madam Lebrenn was busy with the mercantile books of the establishment; her daughter, dressed in mourning, gently rocked on her knees a babe asleep; while George, also in mourning, like his wife, on account of the death of his grandfather Morin a few months previous, sketched on a sheet of paper the draft of a wainscot. Immediately upon his marriage, and agreeable to the wishes of Lebrenn, George had established upon the profit-sharing principle a large joiner's shop on the ground floor of a house contiguous to that of his father-in-law. Sacrovir Lebrenn was reading a treatise on the mechanics of cloth weaving, and from time to time inserted some notes in the margin of his book. Jeanike was busy ironing some napkins, while Gildas, who sat before a little table with a heap of articles of linen belonging to the shop, was labeling and folding them in shape for exhibition in the show window. Madam Lebrenn's face was pensive and sad. So also would surely have been the expression on the face of her daughter, then in the full bloom of her beauty, had she not at that moment exchanged a sweet smile with her babe, which stretched out its arms to her. His mind drawn for a moment from his work by the gurgling laughter of the child, George turned his eyes to, and completed the group with inexpressible joy. It was obvious that a settled grief weighed every instant, so to speak, upon this family, otherwise so tenderly and happily united. Indeed, not an hour seemed to pass without the sad thought embittering the minds of all, that the so-much-beloved, so-much-venerated head was absent from the family hearth. During the first week of the insurrectionary month of June, 1848, Madam Lebrenn took a trip to Brittany in order to make some purchases of linen and visit several members of her family. She took her daughter and son-in-law with her. To the young couple the journey was a pleasure trip. On his part, Sacrovir had gone to Lille on a business errand for his father. He was due back in Paris before his mother's departure. Being, however, detained on the road longer than was expected, he only learned upon his return to Paris of the imprisonment of his father, who was at first sent to the dungeons of the Tuileries as an insurgent. So soon as tidings of this shocking event reached them, Madam Lebrenn, her daughter and George returned from Brittany in all haste.