ously.

"He is a real treasure for us," said Thuillier. "If you only knew how
modest he is! He doesn't do himself justice."

"I can answer for one thing," added Dutocq; "no young man ever
maintained a nobler attitude in poverty; he triumphed over it; but he
suffered--it is easy to see that."

"Poor young man!" cried Zelie. "Such things make my heart ache!"

"Any one could safely trust both secrets and fortune to him," said
Thuillier; "and in these days that is the finest thing that can be said
of a man."

"It is Colleville who is making him laugh," cried Dutocq.

Just then Colleville and la Peyrade returned from the garden the very
best friends in the world.

"Messieurs," said Brigitte, "the soup and the King must never be kept
waiting; give your hand to the ladies."

Five minutes after this little pleasantry (issuing from the lodge of
her father the porter) Brigitte had the satisfaction of seeing her table
surrounded by the principal personages of this drama; the rest, with the
one exception of the odious Cerizet, arrived later.

The portrait of the former maker of canvas money-bags would be
incomplete if we omitted to give a description of one of her best
dinners. The physiognomy of the bourgeois cook of 1840 is, moreover,
one of those details essentially necessary to a history of manners and
customs, and clever housewives may find some lessons in it. A woman
doesn't make empty bags for twenty years without looking out for
the means to fill a few of them. Now Brigitte had one peculiar
characteristic. She united the economy to which she owed her fortune
with a full understanding of necessary expenses. Her relative
prodigality, when it concerned her brother or Celeste, was the antipodes
of avarice. In fact, she often bemoaned herself that she couldn't be
miserly. At her last dinner she had related how, after struggling ten
minute and enduring martyrdom, she had ended by giving ten francs to a
poor workwoman whom she knew, positively, had been without food for two
days.

"Nature," she said naively, "is stronger than reason."

The soup was a rather pale bouillon; for, even on an occasion like this,
the cook had been enjoined to make a great deal of bouillon out of the
beef supplied. Then, as the said beef was to feed the family on the next
day and the day after that, the less juice it expended in the bouillon,
the more substantial were the subsequent dinners. The beef, little
cooked, was always taken away at