It was at breakfast the next morning that Jean noticed, for the first time, the venerable, kindly look of his father’s face.  In truth, advancing years had invested the bookbinder’s appearance with a sort of beauty.  The smooth forehead under the curling white locks betokened a habit of peaceful and honest thoughts.  Old age, while rendering the play of the muscles less active, veiled the distortion of the limbs due to long hours of labour at the bench under the more affecting disfigurements which life and its long-drawn labours impress on all men alike.  The old man had read, thought, striven honestly to do his best, and won the saving grace a simple faith bestows on the humble of heart; for he had become a religious man and a regular attendant at the church of his parish.  Jean told himself it would be an easy and a grateful task to cherish such a father, and he resolved to inaugurate a life of toil and sacrifice.  But he had no employment and no notion what to do.

Shut up in his room, he was filled with a great pity for himself and longed to recover the peace of mind, the calm of the senses, the happy life that had vanished along with the leaf he had abandoned that evening to the drifting current.  He opened a novel, but at the first mention of love he pitched the volume down, and fell to reading a book of travel, following the steps of an English explorer into the reed palace of the King of Uganda.  He ascended the Upper Nile to Urondogami; hippopotamuses snorted in the swamps, waders and guinea-fowl rose in flight, while a herd of antelopes sped flying through the tall grasses.  He was recalled from far, far away by his aunt shouting up the stairs: 

“Jean!  Jean! come down into the shop; your father wants you.”

A stout, red-faced man, with the bent shoulders that come of much stooping over the desk, sat beside the counter.  Monsieur Servien’s eyes rested on his face with a deprecating air.

When the boy appeared, the stranger asked if this was the young man in question, adding in a scolding voice: 

“You are all the same.  You work and sweat and wear yourselves out to make your sons bachelors of arts, and you think the day after the examination the fine fellows will be posted Ambassadors.  For God’s sake! no more graduates, if you please!  We can’t tell what to do with ’em....  Graduates indeed!  Why, they block the road; they are cab-drivers, they distribute handbills in the streets.  You have ’em dying in hospital, rotting in the hulks!  Why didn’t you teach your son your own trade?  Why didn’t you make a bookbinder of him? ...  Oh!  I know why; you needn’t tell me,—­out of ambition!  Well, then! some day your son will die of starvation, blushing for your folly—­and a good job too!  The State! you say, the State! it’s the only word you can put your tongues to.  But it’s cluttered up, the State is!  Take the Treasury; you send us graduates who can’t spell; what d’ye expect us to do with all these loafers?”