oes on living entirely _a sa guise_. This involves no
positive debauchery or ruination, but includes smoking (then, it must be
remembered, almost as great a crime in French as in English middle-class
circles), playing at billiards (ditto), and a free use of strong drink
and strong language. He spends and gives money freely, but does not get
into debt; flirts with grisettes, but falls into no discreditable
entanglement, etc., etc.

His most characteristic peculiarity, however, is his absolute refusal to
learn the rudiments of manners. He keeps his hat on in all companies;
neglects all neatness in dress, etc.; goes (when he _does_ go) among
ladies with garments reeking of tobacco and a mouth full of strange
oaths, and generally remains ignorant of, or recalcitrant to, every form
of conventional politeness in speech and behaviour.

The only person of any sense with whom he has hitherto come in contact,
an old hairdresser named Bellequeue (it must be remembered that this
profession or vocation is not as traditionally ridiculous in French
literature as in ours), persuades his mother that the one chance of
reforming Jean and making him like other people is to marry him off.
They select an eligible _parti_, one Mademoiselle Adelaide Chopard, a
young lady of great bodily height, some facial charms, not exactly a
fool, but not of the most amiable disposition, and possessed of no
actual accomplishment (though she thinks herself almost a "blue") except
that of preserving different fruits in brandy, her father being a
retired liqueur manufacturer. Jean, who has never been in the least "in
love," has no particular objection to Adelaide, and none at all to the
preserved cherries, apricots, etc., and the scenes of his introduction
and, after a fashion, proposal to the damsel, with her first resentment
at his unceremonious behaviour and later positive attraction by it, are
far from bad. Luckily or unluckily--for the marriage might have turned
out at least as well as most marriages of the kind--before it is brought
about, this French Cymon at last meets his real Iphigenia. Walking
rather late at night, he hears a cry, and a footpad (one of his own old
comrades, as it happens) rushes past him with a shawl which he has
snatched from two ladies. Jean counter-snatches the shawl from him and
succours the ladies, one of whom strikes his attention. They ask him to
put them into a cab, and go off--grateful, but giving no address.
However, he p