the people who could thus quiet their
consciences so easily, and hide the cowardly fears which lurked at the
bottom of their hearts under the mask of righteousness.

The baron undertook to direct Paul's studies, and began to instruct him
in Latin. The boy's mother had but one word to say on the subject,
"Whatever you do, don't tire him," and, while lessons were going on, she
would anxiously hang round the door of the school-room, which her father
had forbidden her to enter, because, at every moment, she interrupted
his teaching to ask: "You're sure your feet are not cold, Poulet?" or
"Your head does not ache, does it, Poulet?" or to admonish the master
with: "Don't make him talk so much, he will have a sore throat."

As soon as lessons were over the boy went into the garden with his
mother and aunt. They were all three very fond of gardening, and took
great pleasure and interest in planting and pruning, in watching the
seeds they had sown come up and blossom, and in cutting flowers for
nosegays. Paul devoted himself chiefly to raising salad plants. He had
the entire care of four big beds in the kitchen garden, and there he
cultivated lettuce, endive, cos-lettuce, mustardcress, and every other
known kind of salad. He dug, watered, weeded, and planted, and made his
two mothers work like day laborers, and for hours together they knelt on
the borders, soiling their hands and dresses as they planted the
seedlings in the holes they made with their forefingers in the mold.

Poulet was almost fifteen; he had grown wonderfully, and the highest
mark on the drawing-room wall was over five feet from the ground, but in
mind he was still an ignorant, foolish child, for he had no opportunity
of expanding his intellect, confined as he was to the society of these
two women and the good-tempered old man who was so far behind the times.
At last one evening the baron said it was time for the boy to go to
college. Aunt Lison withdrew into a dark corner in horror at the idea,
and Jeanne began to sob.

"Why does he want to know so much?" she replied. "We will bring him up
to be a gentleman farmer, to devote himself to the cultivation of his
property, as so many noblemen do, and he will pass his life happily in
this house, where we have lived before him and where we shall die. What
more can he want?"

The baron shook his head.

"What answer will you make if he comes to you a few years hence, and
says: 'I am nothing, and I know nothing th