e 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, and made nothing of scaling walls. He had no equal
at bodily exercises, he played base to perfection, and could have outrun
a hare. With a keen eye worthy of Leather-stocking, he loved hunting
passionately. His time was passed in firing at a mark, instead of
studying; and he spent the money extracted from the old doctor in buying
powder and ball for a wretched pistol that old Gilet, the sabot-maker,
had given him. During the autumn of 1806, Maxence, then seventeen,
committed an involuntary murder, by frightening in the dusk a young
woman who was pregnant, and who came upon him suddenly while stealing
fruit in her garden. Threatened with the guillotine by Gilet, who
doubtless wanted to get rid of him, Max fled to Bourges, met a regiment
then on its way to Egypt, and en