At this point, from one corner of the parlour, a crow of childish laughter went off like a rocket.

Monsieur Tudesco stopped short and smiled, his hair flying, his eye moist, his arms thrown open as if to embrace and bless; then he resumed: 

“I say it:  the laugh of innocence is the ill-starred veteran’s joy.  I see from where I stand groups worthy of Correggio’s brush, and I say:  Happy the families that meet together in peace in the heart of their fatherland!  Ladies and gentlemen, pardon me if I hold out to you the casque of Belisarius.  I am an old tree riven by the levin-bolt.”

And he went from group to group holding out his peaked felt hat, into which, amid an icy silence, fell coin by coin a dribble of small silver.

But suddenly the Superintendent of Studies seized the hat and pushed the old man outside.

“Give me back my hat,” bawled Monsieur Tudesco to the Superintendent, who was doing his best to restore the coins to the donors; “give back the old man’s hat, the hat of one who has grown grey in learned studies.”

The Superintendent, scarlet with rage, tossed the felt into the court, shouting: 

“Be off, or I will call the police.”

The Marquis Tudesco took to his heels with great agility.

The same evening the new Assistant was summoned to the Director’s presence and received his dismissal.

“Unhappy boy! unhappy boy!” said the Abbe Bordier, beating his brow; “you have been the cause of an intolerable scandal, of a sort unheard of in this house, and that just when I had so much to do.”

And as he spoke, the scattered papers fluttered like white birds on the Director’s table.

Making his way through the parlour, Jean saw the Mater dolorosa as before, and read again the names of Philippe-Guy Thiererche and the Countess Valentine.

“I hate them,” he muttered through clenched teeth, “I hate them all.”

Meantime, the good priest felt a stir of pity.  Every day they had badgered him with reports against Jean Servien.  This time he had given way; he had sacrificed the young usher; but he really could make nothing of this tale about a beggar.  He changed his mind, ran to the door and called to the young man to corne back.

Jean turned and faced him: 

“No!” he cried, “no!  I can bear the life no longer; I am unhappy, I am full of misery—­and hate.”

“Poor lad!” sight the Director, letting his arms drop by his side.

That evening he did not write a single line of his Tragedy.

XXVII

The kind-hearted bookbinder harassed his son with no reproaches.

After dinner he went and sat at his shop-door, and looked at the first star that peeped out in the evening sky.

“My boy,” said he, “I am not a man of learning like you; but I have a notion—­and you must not rob me of it, because it is a comfort to me—­that, when I have finished binding books, I shall go to that star.  The idea occurred to me from what I have read in the paper that the stars are all worlds.  What is that star called?”