lent God."

It was the _citoyen_ Brotteaux, once farmer of taxes and _ci-devant_
noble; his father, having made a fortune in these transactions, had
bought himself an office conferring a title on the possessor. In the
good old times Maurice Brotteaux had called himself Monsieur des Ilettes
and used to give elegant suppers which the fair Madame de Rochemaure,
wife of a King's _procureur_, enlivened with her bright glances,--a
finished gentlewoman whose loyal fidelity was never impugned so long as
the Revolution left Maurice Brotteaux in possession of his offices and
emoluments, his hotel, his estates and his noble name. The Revolution
swept them all away. He made his living by painting portraits under the
archways of doors, making pancakes and fritters on the Quai de la
Megisserie, composing speeches for the representatives of the people and
giving dancing lessons to the young _citoyennes_. At the present time,
in his garret into which you climbed by a ladder and where a man could
not stand upright, Maurice Brotteaux, the proud owner of a glue-pot, a
ball of twine, a box of water-colours and sundry clippings of paper,
manufactured dancing-dolls which he sold to wholesale toy-dealers, who
resold them to the pedlars who hawked them up and down the
Champs-Elysees at the end of a pole,--glittering magnets to draw the
little ones' eyes. Amidst the calamities of the State and the disaster
that overwhelmed himself, he preserved an unruffled spirit, reading for
the refreshment of his mind in his Lucretius, which he carried with him
wherever he went in the gaping pocket of his plum-coloured surtout.

Evariste Gamelin pushed open the door of his lodging. It offered no
resistance, for his poverty spared him any trouble about lock and key;
when his mother from force of habit shot the bolt, he would tell her:
"Why, what's the good? Folks don't steal spiders'-webs,--nor my
pictures, neither." In his workroom were piled, under a thick layer of
dust or with faces turned to the wall, the canvases of his student
years,--when, as the fashion of the day was, he limned scenes of
gallantry, depicting with a sleek, timorous brush emptied quivers and
birds put to flight, risky pastimes and reveries of bliss, high-kilted
goose-girls and shepherdesses with rose-wreathed bosoms.

But it was not a genre that suited his temperament. His cold treatment
of such like scenes proved the painter's incurable purity of heart.
Amateurs were right: Gamelin