and that there was no hope of his
recovery--in full possession of his faculties and joy in his dull
eyes--he gave his name to Pepa, and made her his lawful widow, in the
presence of all his friends. She inherited everything that her former
lover left behind, a considerable income from his share of the annual
profits on his books, and also his pension, which the State continued to
pay to her.

Little Ramel throve wonderfully amidst all this luxury, and gave free
scope to his instincts and his caprices, without his mother ever having
the courage to reprove him in the least, and he did not bear the
slightest resemblance to Jean Ramel.

Full of pranks, effeminate, a superfine dandy, and precociously vicious,
he suggested the idea of those pages at the Court of Florence, whom we
frequently meet with in _The Decameron_, and who were the playthings for
the idle hands and tips of the patrician ladies.

He was very ignorant and lived at a great rate, bet on races, and played
cards for heavy stakes with seasoned gamblers, old enough to be his
father. And it was distressing to hear this lad joke about the memory of
him whom he called _the old man_, and persecute his mother because of
the worship and adoration which she felt for Jean Ramel, whom she spoke
of as if he had become a demigod when he died, like in Roman theogony.

He would have liked altogether to have altered the arrangement of that
kind of sanctuary, the drawing-room, where Pepa kept some of her
husband's manuscripts, the furniture that he had most frequently used,
the bed on which he had died, his pens, his clothes and his weapons. And
one evening, not knowing how to dress himself up more originally than
the rest for a masked ball that stout Toinette Danicheff was going to
give as her house-warming, without saying a word to his mother, he took
down the Academician's dress, the sword and cocked hat that had belonged
to Jean Ramel, and put it on as if it had been a disguise on Shrove
Tuesday.

Slightly built and with thin arms and legs, the wide clothes hung on
him, and he was a comical sight with the embroidered skirt of his coat
sweeping the carpet, and his sword knocking against his heels. The
elbows and the collar were shiny and greasy from wear, for the _Master_
had worn it until it was threadbare, to avoid having to buy another, and
had never thought of replacing it.

He made a tremendous hit, and fair Liline Ablette laughed so at his
grimaces and his disg