The purchase of the house, the saving of money to furnish dowries for his sisters, and bad harvests had narrowed their circumstances. His father had worried at the thought of leaving his children without a patrimony; and though he had taken great delight in them in their tender years, he reproached himself now for their existence. What she could do to help, she had done. In their various exigencies she had been generously helped by Madame Paradis, their neighbor. This lady had done this from affection, only stipulating that their father should not know. She had furnished the money for Lamartine's expenses. "I had hoped," she continued, "that your father's family would perceive the craving for activity which is wasting your youth, and be prompted to the outlay necessary to enable you to enter and go through with the preparatory course for an administrative or diplomatic career. I have reasoned with them, prayed, conjured, wept, humbled myself before them as it is glorious and agreeable for a mother to humiliate herself for her son. It is in vain." As he was to be the heir to their estates, they saw no necessity for him to desire or be ambitious for an active career beyond their sphere of life. Hence her pleading had only brought harsh words and unkind feeling toward herself without doing him any service. If Providence had granted her wish she would have made use of every opportunity to open for him a larger horizon, and a career worthy of him. But he must wait. She also asked him to make her his only confidant. A complaint to his father would drive him to despair, because he could not help. "Accept this obscure and unoccupied life for a few years," she pleaded. "I will pray God to move the hearts of your uncles and aunts, and to open for my son that field of activity, extent, glory and happy fortune, which he has permitted a mother to desire for such a son as you." To such an appeal Lamartine could only acquiesce. The life upon which he thus entered has had many counterparts. The older uncle gave law to the whole family as its recognized head. He and his nephew had many angry encounters. The mother would endeavor anxiously to reconcile them. The Chevalier, bearing in mind the interest of all his children, remained neutral. The uncle, regarding Alphonse as his prospective successor, desired him to remain quietly at home, cultivate science, apply himself to agriculture and domestic economy, and in time become the head of a family in the province. Lamartine acknowledged that such a career would have been the most natural and happy. "But," he adds, "everyone when coming into the world has his allotment marked out in his nature. This career was not for me, and my uncle had not been able to read the fact in my eyes."