toe. He would listen, shake his head with an admiring
air, as he watched his wife: "She is astonishing!" for he himself
understood nothing about literature, and there, at least, he could
discover once again the superiority of Mlle. Afchin.

"She had the instinct of the stage," as Cardailhac used to say; but, on
the other hand, the maternal instinct was wanting in her. Never did
she take any interest in her children, abandoning them to the hands of
strangers, and, when they were brought to her once a month, contenting
herself with offering to them the flaccid and inanimate flesh of
her cheeks between two puffs of cigarette-smoke, without making any
inquiries into those details of their bringing up and of their health
which perpetuate the physical bond of maternity and make the hearts of
true mothers bleed at the least suffering of their children.

They were three big, dull and apathetic boys of eleven, nine, and seven
years, having, with the sallow complexion and the precocious bloatedness
of the Levantine, the kind, black, velvety eyes of their father. They
were ignorant as young lords of the middle ages. At Tunis, M. Bompain
had directed their studies; but at Paris, the Nabob, anxious to give
them the benefit of a Parisian education, had sent them to that smartest
and most expensive of boarding-schools, the College Bourdaloue, managed
by good priests who sought less to instruct their pupils than to make of
them good-mannered and right-thinking men of the world, and succeeded
in turning them out affectedly grave and ridiculous little prigs,
disdainful of games, absolutely ignorant, without anything spontaneous
or boyish about them, and of a desperate precocity. The little
Jansoulets were not very happy in this forcing-house, notwithstanding
the immunities which they enjoyed by reason of their immense wealth;
they were, indeed, utterly left to themselves. Even the creoles in the
charge of the institution had some friend whom they visited and people
who came to see them; but the Jansoulets were never summoned to the
parlour, no one knew any of their relatives; from time to time they
received basketfuls of sweetmeats, piles of confectionery, and that was
all. The Nabob, doing some shopping in Paris, would strip for them the
whole of a pastry-cook's window and send the spoils to the college, with
that generous impulse of the heart mingled with negro ostentation
which characterized all his actions. It was the same in the mat