About this time Seguin and his uncle, who had never set foot in the house of the Avenue d’Antin since insanity had reigned there, drew together again.  Their apparent reconciliation was the outcome of a drama shrouded in secrecy.  Seguin, hard up and in debt, cast off by Nora, who divined his approaching ruin, and preyed upon by other voracious creatures, had ended by committing, on the turf, one of those indelicate actions which honest people call thefts.  Du Hordel, on being apprised of the matter, had hastened forward and had paid what was due in order to avoid a frightful scandal.  And he was so upset by the extraordinary muddle in which he found his nephew’s home, once all prosperity, that remorse came upon him as if he were in some degree responsible for what had happened, since he had egotistically kept away from his relatives for his own peace’s sake.  But he was more particularly won over by his grandniece Andree, now a delicious young girl well-nigh eighteen years of age, and therefore marriageable.  She alone sufficed to attract him to the house, and he was greatly distressed by the dangerous state of abandonment in which he found her.

Her father continued dragging out his worthless life away from home.  Her mother, Valentine, had just emerged from a frightful crisis, her final rupture with Santerre, who had made up his mind to marry a very wealthy old lady, which, after all, was the logical destiny of such a crafty exploiter of women, one who behind his affectation of cultured pessimism had the vilest and greediest of natures.  Valentine, distracted by this rupture, had now thrown herself into religion, and, like her husband, disappeared from the house for whole days.  She was said to be an active helpmate of old Count de Navarede, the president of a society of Catholic propaganda.  Gaston, her son, having left Saint-Cyr three months previously, was now at the Cavalry School of Saumur, so fired with passion for a military career that he already spoke of remaining a bachelor, since a soldier’s sword should be his only love, his only spouse.  Then Lucie, now nineteen years old, and full of mystical exaltation, had already entered an Ursuline convent for her novitiate.  And in the big empty home, whence father, mother, brother and sister fled, there remained but the gentle and adorable Andree, exposed to all the blasts of insanity which even now swept through the household, and so distressed by loneliness, that her uncle, Du Hordel, full of compassionate affection, conceived the idea of giving her a husband in the person of young Ambroise, the future conqueror.