ch tended to the employment of
certain chemical products in industry. So he and Marguerite installed
themselves on the very summit of Montmartre, in a little house, at a
rental of eight hundred francs a year, the great convenience of the place
being a strip of garden, where one might, later on, erect a wooden
workshop. In all tranquillity Madame Leroi took up her abode with the
young people, helping them, and sparing them the necessity of keeping a
second servant. And at successive intervals of two years, her three
grandchildren were born, three sturdy boys: first Thomas, then Francois,
and then Antoine. And in the same way as she had devoted herself to her
husband and daughter, and then to Guillaume, so did she now devote
herself to the three children. She became "Mere-Grand"--an emphatic and
affectionate way of expressing the term "grandmother"--for all who lived
in the house, the older as well as the younger ones. She there
personified sense, and wisdom, and courage; it was she who was ever on
the watch, who directed everything, who was consulted about everything,
and whose opinion was always followed. Indeed, she reigned there like an
all-powerful queen-mother.

For fifteen years this life went on, a life of hard work and peaceful
affection, while the strictest economy was observed in contenting every
need of the modest little household. Then Guillaume lost his mother, took
his share of the family inheritance, and was able to satisfy his old
desire, which was to buy the house he lived in, and build a spacious
workshop in the garden. He was even able to build it of bricks, and add
an upper story to it. But the work was scarcely finished, and life seemed
to be on the point of expanding and smiling on them all, when misfortune
returned, and typhoid fever, with brutal force, carried off Marguerite,
after a week's illness. She was then five and thirty, and her eldest boy,
Thomas, was fourteen. Thus Guillaume, distracted by his loss, found
himself a widower at thirty-eight. The thought of introducing any unknown
woman into that retired home, where all hearts beat in tender unison, was
so unbearable to him that he determined to take no other mate. His work
absorbed him, and he would know how to quiet both his heart and his
flesh. Mere-Grand, fortunately, was still there, erect and courageous;
the household retained its queen, and in her the children found a
manageress and teacher, schooled in adversity and heroism.

Two y