Here follows the causes which made Mademoiselle Thuillier the owner of the house. CHAPTER II. THE HISTORY OF A TYRANNY At the fall of the Villele ministry, Monsieur Louis-Jerome Thuillier, who had then seen twenty-six years’ service as a clerk in the ministry of finance, became sub-director of a department thereof; but scarcely had he enjoyed the subaltern authority of a position formerly his lowest hope, when the events of July, 1830, forced him to resign it. He calculated, shrewdly enough, that his pension would be honorably and readily given by the new-comers, glad to have another office at their disposal. He was right; for a pension of seventeen hundred francs was paid to him immediately. When the prudent sub-director first talked of resigning, his sister, who was far more the companion of his life than his wife, trembled for his future. “What will become of Thuillier?” was a question which Madame and Mademoiselle Thuillier put to each other with mutual terror in their little lodging on a third floor of the rue d’Argenteuil. “Securing his pension will occupy him for a time,” Mademoiselle Thuillier said one day; “but I am thinking of investing my savings in a way that will cut out work for him. Yes; it will be something like administrating the finances to manage a piece of property.” “Oh, sister! you will save his life,” cried Madame Thuillier. “I have always looked for a crisis of this kind in Jerome’s life,” replied the old maid, with a protecting air. Mademoiselle Thuillier had too often heard her brother remark: “Such a one is dead; he only survived his retirement two years”; she had too often heard Colleville, her brother’s intimate friend, a government employee like himself, say, jesting on this climacteric of bureaucrats, “We shall all come to it, ourselves,” not to appreciate the danger her brother was running. The change from activity to leisure is, in truth, the critical period for government employees of all kinds. Those of them who know not how to substitute, or perhaps cannot substitute other occupations for the work to which they have been accustomed, change in a singular manner; some die outright; others take to fishing, the vacancy of that amusement resembling that of their late employment under government; others, who are smarter men, dabble in stocks, lose their savings, and are thankful to obtain a place in some enterprise that is likely to succeed, after a first disaster and liquidation, in the hands of an abler management. The late clerk then rubs his hands, now empty, and says to himself, “I always did foresee the success of the business.” But nearly all these retired bureaucrats have to fight against their former habits.