ge_ at the Academy of
Painting. Elodie, who was a girl of some experience, quite realised that
there are different sorts of love. The sentiment Evariste inspired in
her heart was profound enough for her to dream of making him the partner
of her life. She was very ready to marry him, but hardly expected her
father would approve the union of his only daughter with a poor and
unknown artist. Gamelin had nothing, while the printseller turned over
large sums of money. The _Amour peintre_ brought him in large profits,
the share market larger still, and he was in partnership with an army
contractor who supplied the cavalry of the Republic with rushes in place
of hay and mildewed oats. In a word, the cutler's son of the Rue
Saint-Dominique was a very insignificant personage beside the publisher
of engravings, a man known throughout Europe, related to the Blaizots,
Basans and Didots, and an honoured guest at the houses of the _citoyens_
Saint-Pierre and Florian. Not that, as an obedient daughter should, she
held her father's consent to be an indispensable preliminary to her
settlement in life. The latter, early left a widower, and a man of a
self-indulgent, volatile temper, as enterprising with women as he was in
business, had never paid much heed to her and had left her to develop at
her own sweet will, untrammelled whether by parental advice or parental
affection, more careful to ignore than to safeguard the girl's
behaviour, whose passionate temperament he appreciated as a connoisseur
of the sex and in whom he recognized charms far and away more seductive
than a pretty face. Too generous-hearted to be circumspect, too clever
to come to harm, cautious even in her caprices, passion had never made
her forget the social proprieties. Her father was infinitely grateful
for this prudent behaviour, and as she had inherited from him a good
head for business and a taste for money-making, he never troubled
himself as to the mysterious reasons that deterred a girl so eminently
marriageable from entering that estate and kept her at home, where she
was as good as a housekeeper and four clerks to him. At twenty-seven she
felt old enough and experienced enough to manage her own concerns and
had no need to ask the advice or consult the wishes of a father still a
young man, and one of so easy-going and careless a temper. But for her
to marry Gamelin, Monsieur Blaise must needs contrive a future for a
son-in-law with such poor prospects, give him