rdon senior for
a chemist; chance opened the way for a retail druggist's business in
Angouleme. After many years of scientific research, death cut him off in
the midst of his incompleted experiments, and the great discovery that
should have brought wealth to the family was never made. Chardon had
tried to find a specific for the gout. Gout is a rich man's malady; the
rich will pay large sums to recover health when they have lost it, and
for this reason the druggist deliberately selected gout as his problem.
Halfway between the man of science on the one side and the charlatan on
the other, he saw that the scientific method was the one road to assured
success, and had studied the causes of the complaint, and based his
remedy on a certain general theory of treatment, with modifications in
practice for varying temperaments. Then, on a visit to Paris undertaken
to solicit the approval of the _Academie des Sciences_, he died, and
lost all the fruits of his labors.

It may have been that some presentiment of the end had led the country
druggist to do all that in him lay to give his boy and girl a good
education; the family had been living up to the income brought in by
the business; and now when they were left almost destitute, it was an
aggravation of their misfortune that they had been brought up in the
expectations of a brilliant future; for these hopes were extinguished
by their father's death. The great Desplein, who attended Chardon in his
last illness, saw him die in convulsions of rage.

The secret of the army surgeon's ambition lay in his passionate love
for his wife, the last survivor of the family of Rubempre, saved as by
a miracle from the guillotine in 1793. He had gained time by declaring
that she was pregnant, a lie told without the girl's knowledge or
consent. Then, when in a manner he had created a claim to call her his
wife, he had married her in spite of their common poverty. The children
of this marriage, like all children of love, inherited the mother's
wonderful beauty, that gift so often fatal when accompanied by poverty.
The life of hope and hard work and despair, in all of which Mme.
Chardon had shared with such keen sympathy, had left deep traces in her
beautiful face, just as the slow decline of a scanty income had changed
her ways and habits; but both she and her children confronted evil
days bravely enough. She sold the druggist's shop in the Grand' Rue de
L'Houmeau, the principal suburb of Angoul