; and the pains which he bestowed on his garden, the
sweet round of the labors of the months, held Goodman Blondet fast in
his greenhouse. But for that hobby he would have been a deputy under
the Empire, and shone conspicuous beyond a doubt in the Corps
Legislatif.

His marriage was the second cause of his obscurity. As a man of forty,
he was rash enough to marry a girl of eighteen, by whom he had a son
named Joseph in the first year of their marriage. Three years
afterwards Mme. Blondet, then the prettiest woman in the town,
inspired in the prefect of the department a passion which ended only
with her death. The prefect was the father of her second son Emile;
the whole town knew this, old Blondet himself knew it. The wife who
might have roused her husband's ambition, who might have won him away
from his flowers, positively encouraged the judge in his botanical
tastes. She no more cared to leave the place than the prefect cared to
leave his prefecture so long as his mistress lived.

Blondet felt himself unequal at his age to a contest with a young
wife. He sought consolation in his greenhouse, and engaged a very
pretty servant-maid to assist him to tend his ever-changing bevy of
beauties. So while the judge potted, pricked out, watered, layered,
slipped, blended, and induced his flowers to break, Mme. Blondet spent
his substance on the dress and finery in which she shone at the
prefecture. One interest alone had power to draw her away from the
tender care of a romantic affection which the town came to admire in
the end; and this interest was Emile's education. The child of love
was a bright and pretty boy, while Joseph was no less heavy and
plain-featured. The old judge, blinded by paternal affection loved
Joseph as his wife loved Emile.

For a dozen years M. Blondet bore his lot with perfect resignation. He
shut his eyes to his wife's intrigue with a dignified, well-bred
composure, quite in the style of an eighteenth century grand seigneur;
but, like all men with a taste for a quiet life, he could cherish a
profound dislike, and he hated his younger son. When his wife died,
therefore, in 1818, he turned the intruder out of the house, and
packed him off to Paris to study law on an allowance of twelve hundred
francs for all resource, nor could any cry of distress extract another
penny from his purse. Emile Blondet would have gone under if it had
not been for his real father.

M. Blondet's house was one of the pretti