d never missed mass of a morning. To
give some idea of the domestic life of the household, it will be
enough to remark that the father and son never ate fruit till it was
beginning to spoil, because Mlle. Cadot always brought out anything
that would not keep. No one in the house ever tasted the luxury of new
bread, and all the fast days in the calendar were punctually observed.
The gardener was put on rations like a soldier; the elderly Valideh
always kept an eye upon him. And she, for her part, was so
deferentially treated, that she took her meals with the family, and in
consequence was continually trotting to and fro between the kitchen
and the parlor at breakfast and dinner time.

Mlle. Blandureau's parents had consented to her marriage with Joseph
Blondet upon one condition--the penniless and briefless barrister must
be an assistant judge. So, with the desire of fitting his son to fill
the position, old M. Blondet racked his brains to hammer the law into
his son's head by dint of lessons, so as to make a cut-and-dried
lawyer of him. As for Blondet junior, he spent almost every evening at
the Blandureaus' house, to which also young Fabien du Ronceret had
been admitted since his return, without raising the slightest
suspicion in the minds of father or son.

Everything in this life of theirs was measured with an accuracy worthy
of Gerard Dow's Money Changer; not a grain of salt too much, not a
single profit foregone; but the economical principles by which it was
regulated were relaxed in favor of the greenhouse and garden. "The
garden was the master's craze," Mlle. Cadot used to say. The master's
blind fondness for Joseph was not a craze in her eyes; she shared the
father's predilection; she pampered Joseph; she darned his stockings;
and would have been better pleased if the money spent on the garden
had been put by for Joseph's benefit.

That garden was kept in marvelous order by a single man; the paths,
covered with river-sand, continually turned over with the rake,
meandered among the borders full of the rarest flowers. Here were all
kinds of color and scent, here were lizards on the walls, legions of
little flower-pots standing out in the sun, regiments of forks and
hoes, and a host of innocent things, a combination of pleasant results
to justify the gardener's charming hobby.

At the end of the greenhouse the judge had set up a grandstand, an
amphitheatre of benches to hold some five or six thousand pelargoniu