Seeing the young artisan, at these words, grow mortally pale, and stagger, the lawyer supported him, and continued in his mock-paternal voice: "John, I counted on you to help us bear the blow that was to fall on us. Now you weaken--" Young Lebrenn pulled himself together, summoned back his spirits, and in a voice which he strove hard to render firm, said: "Now I am calmer. Be pleased to inform me how these projects of marriage, first hailed by you with such kindness, are now suddenly become impossible?" "Helas!--because of all the joy--which your proposal heaped upon me, I forgot, as you did--a sad circumstance. And then, all of a sudden the memory--came back to me. Your family--is it, like mine, stainless? Alas, no! Your father wrote--printed--published a pamphlet in which he recorded that his daughter--your sister--had been the mistress of King Louis XV. You know my susceptibility where honor is concerned! My daughter may never enter the family which bears that indelible blot." "Ah, by my faith! The trick is great!" muttered Hubert, the financier, stepping out of the neighboring room and slowly entering the parlor without at first being perceived by either John Lebrenn or Desmarais. Hearing only the words of the father of his beloved one, John at first reeled with dismay. But his good sense quickly coming to his aid, and remembering the doubts of his father and Victoria as to Desmarais's consent to his daughter's union with an ironsmith's apprentice, he detected the refusal hypocritically veiled under the excuse employed by the advocate. Cruel was the young man's disillusionment. It dashed at once his dearest hopes, and his confidence, until then implicit, in the sincerity of the principles professed by the deputy of the Third Estate. The double shock was so severe that John, refusing, like all generous characters, to believe evil, began to cast about for excuses for the advocate's conduct. The following thought sprang up in his head: Perhaps Desmarais had learned of the consequences of the debauchery of Louis XV; perhaps he knew that Victoria had been held in the lupanar in King Louis's "Doe Park," and had later been imprisoned in the Repentant Women. If he knew all this, John thought, Desmarais could not help, as Victoria had told him, but refuse, upon a very pardonable scruple, to grant him his daughter. Preserving, then, his hope, not indeed of overcoming the objections of Charlotte's father, but of being saved from having to regard him as a double-dealer and a traitor, John controlled his emotions, raised his head, and turned his eyes square upon Desmarais. Only then did he perceive the presence of banker Hubert, the sight of whom always inspired him with the profoundest antipathy. Surprised and pained, above all, at the presence of this personage at so delicate a juncture, John remarked that the financier conversed in a low and sardonic voice with his brother-in-law.