Since in Césarine, Felix found no intelligent and sympathetic companion, he took into intimacy a kind of apprentice whom he had literally picked up on the road. A slender lad of southern origin, whom a band of vagrants, making for the sea to embark to South America, had cast off to die in the ditch. Clemenceau gave him shelter, nursed him--for his wife would have nothing to do with a beggar--and to cover the hospitality and soothe the Italian's pride, paid him liberally to be his model. He was named Antonino and might have been a descendant of the Emperor from his lofty features, burning eye and fine sentiments. Healed, able to resume his journey and offered a loan to make it smooth, he effusively uttered a declaration of gratitude and devotion, and vowed to remain the slave of the man who had saved him from a miserable death. A good work rarely goes unrewarded. Antonino, who had never touched a piece of colored chalk to a black stone, soon revealed strong gift as a draftsman and served his new master with brightness and taste. Left lonely by his wife, each day more and more estranged, Felix loved to labor with the youth in the tasks to both congenial. That Césarine should grow jealous would be natural, but it was pique that she felt toward Felix. In Antonino, she saw the possible instrument of her vengeance. His good looks, fervid temperament, youthful impressionability, all conspired in her favor as well as the innate artistic craving which had at the first sight lifted her on a pedestal as his ideal of the woman to be idolized. Nevertheless, the vagabond had a stronger spirit than she anticipated, and the emotion which she set down as timidity, and which protected him from the baseness of deceiving his benefactor, was due to honor. She flattered herself that she could pluck the fruit at any time, and, since this moneyless youth could not in the least appease her yearning for inordinate luxury, she cast about for another conquest. Clemenceau would not hear of his home being turned into the pandemonium of a country-house receiving all "the society that amuses," and rigidly restricted his wife from visiting where she would meet the odd medley in the suburbs of Paris. Retired opera-singers, Bohemians who have made a fortune by chance, superseded politicians, officials who have perfected libeling into an art, and reformed female celebrities of the dancing-gardens and burlesque theatres. But, as society is constituted, it would have earned him the reputation of a tyrant if he had refused her receiving and returning the visits of the venerable Marchioness de Latour-Lagneau, to whom the Bishop always accorded an hour during his pastoral calls. This was a neighbor.