Yet Maurice, her son, after a delicate youth which had necessitated great care, was now a handsome fellow of nineteen, still somewhat pale, but vigorous in appearance.  He had completed his studies in a fairly satisfactory manner, and was already helping his father in the management of the works.  And his adoring mother had never set higher hopes upon his head.  She already pictured him as the master of that great establishment, whose prosperity he would yet increase, thereby rising to royal wealth and power.

Constance’s worship for that only son, to-morrow’s hero; increased the more since his father day by day declined in her estimation, till she regarded him in fact with naught but contempt and disgust.  It was a logical downfall, which she could not stop, and the successive phases of which she herself fatally precipitated.  At the outset she had overlooked his infidelity; then from a spirit of duty and to save him from irreparable folly she had sought to retain him near her; and finally, failing in her endeavor, she had begun to feel loathing and disgust.  He was now two-and-forty, he drank too much, he ate too much, he smoked too much.  He was growing corpulent and scant of breath, with hanging lips and heavy eyelids; he no longer took care of his person as formerly, but went about slipshod, and indulged in the coarsest pleasantries.  But it was more particularly away from his home that he sank into degradation, indulging in the low debauchery which had ever attracted him.  Every now and again he disappeared from the house and slept elsewhere; then he concocted such ridiculous falsehoods that he could not be believed, or else did not take the trouble to lie at all.  Constance, who felt powerless to influence him, ended by allowing him complete freedom.

The worst was, that the dissolute life he led grievously affected the business.  He who had been such a great and energetic worker had lost both mental and bodily vigor; he could no longer plan remunerative strokes of business; he no longer had the strength to undertake important contracts.  He lingered in bed in the morning, and remained for three or four days without once going round the works, letting disorder and waste accumulate there, so that his once triumphal stock-takings now year by year showed a falling-off.  And what an end it was for that egotist, that enjoyer, so gayly and noisily active, who had always professed that money—­capital increased tenfold by the labor of others—­was the only desirable source of power, and whom excess of money and excess of enjoyment now cast with appropriate irony to slow ruin, the final paralysis of the impotent.