pair, and began to sob quite loudly.

"Hallo! What's the matter? What are you crying for?" asked Pierre,
suddenly awaking.

She did not reply, but cried more bitterly.

"Come, come, do answer," continued her husband, frightened by this mute
despair. "Where have you been? Have you seen the insurgents?"

She shook her head; then, in a faint voice, she said: "I've just come
from the Valqueyras mansion. I wanted to ask Monsieur de Carnavant's
advice. Ah! my dear, all is lost."

Pierre sat up in bed, very pale. His bull neck, which his unbuttoned
night-shirt exposed to view, all his soft, flabby flesh seemed to swell
with terror. At last he sank back, pale and tearful, looking like some
grotesque Chinese figure in the middle of the untidy bed.

"The marquis," continued Felicite, "thinks that Prince Louis has
succumbed. We are ruined; we shall never get a sou."

Thereupon, as often happens with cowards, Pierre flew into a passion. It
was the marquis's fault, it was his wife's fault, the fault of all
his family. Had he ever thought of politics at all, until Monsieur de
Carnavant and Felicite had driven him to that tomfoolery?

"I wash my hands of it altogether," he cried. "It's you two who are
responsible for the blunder. Wasn't it better to go on living on
our little savings in peace and quietness? But then, you were always
determined to have your own way! You see what it has brought us to."

He was losing his head completely, and forgot that he had shown himself
as eager as his wife. However, his only desire now was to vent his
anger, by laying the blame of his ruin upon others.

"And, moreover," he continued, "could we ever have succeeded with
children like ours? Eugene abandons us just at the critical moment;
Aristide has dragged us through the mire, and even that big simpleton
Pascal is compromising us by his philanthropic practising among the
insurgents. And to think that we brought ourselves to poverty simply to
give them a university education!"

Then, as he drew breath, Felicite said to him softly: "You are
forgetting Macquart."

"Ah! yes; I was forgetting him," he resumed more violently than ever;
"there's another whom I can't think of without losing all patience! But
that's not all; you know little Silvere. Well, I saw him at my mother's
the other evening with his hands covered with blood. He has put some
gendarme's eye out. I did not tell you of it, as I didn't want to
frighten you. But you'll see one