Agathe's birth. But the friendship which bound the
two men together before their quarrel was so close that, to use an
expression of that region and that period, "they willingly walked the
same road." Some people said that Maxence was as likely to be the son
of the doctor as of the sub-delegate; but in fact he belonged to
neither the one nor the other,--his father being a charming dragoon
officer in garrison at Bourges. Nevertheless, as a result of their
enmity, and very fortunately for the child, Rouget and Lousteau never
ceased to claim his paternity.

Max's mother, the wife of a poor sabot-maker in the Rome suburb, was
possessed, for the perdition of her soul, of a surprising beauty, a
Trasteverine beauty, the only property which she transmitted to her
son. Madame Gilet, pregnant with Maxence in 1788, had long desired
that blessing, which the town attributed to the gallantries of the two
friends,--probably in the hope of setting them against each other.
Gilet, an old drunkard with a triple throat, treated his wife's
misconduct with a collusion that is not uncommon among the lower
classes. To make sure of protectors for her son, Madame Gilet was
careful not to enlighten his reputed fathers as to his parentage. In
Paris, she would have turned out a millionaire; at Issoudun she lived
sometimes at her ease, more often miserably, and, in the long run,
despised. Madame Hochon, Lousteau's sister, paid sixty francs a year
for the lad's schooling. This liberality, which Madame Hochon was
quite unable to practise on her own account because of her husband's
stinginess, was naturally attributed to her brother, then living at
Sancerre.

When Doctor Rouget, who certainly was not lucky in sons, observed
Max's beauty, he paid the board of the "young rogue," as he called
him, at the seminary, up to the year 1805. As Lousteau died in 1800,
and the doctor apparently obeyed a feeling of vanity in paying the
lad's board until 1805, the question of the paternity was left forever
undecided. Maxence Gilet, the butt of many jests, was soon forgotten,
--and for this reason: In 1806, a year after Doctor Rouget's death,
the lad, who seemed to have been created for a venturesome life, and
was moreover gifted with remarkable vigor and agility, got into a
series of scrapes which more or less threatened his safety. He plotted
with the grandsons of Monsieur Hochon to worry the grocers of the
city; he gathered fruit before the owners could pick it,