Among the secluded villas that dot with pretty colors the suburb of Montmorency, there is none more agreeable than the Villa Reine-Claude, which was in the hands of the notary who had managed the transmission of the maintenance money to young Clemenceau.  At the hint from M. Ritz, who had a debt of honor to pay the son of his dead friend, the house was rented at a nominal sum.  Here Felix, as he boldly described himself by right, though the name had a tinge of mockery, installed himself with his bride.  He had a portfolio of architectural sketches soon completed and, thanks to the fellowship to which his name might exercise a spell, all the old artists who had known his father, helped him manfully.  Luckily, there was something markedly novel in his work.

His odd training helped him.  He came from the Polish University into an unromantic society which, after its stirring up by the Great Revolution, was so levelled and amalgamated that everybody resembled his neighbor as well in manners and speech as in attire.  Strong characters, heated passions, black vices, deep prejudices, grievous misfortunes, and even utterly ridiculous persons had disappeared.  The country he had been reared in still thrilled with patriotism and meant something when it muttered threats to kill its tyrant—­meant so much that the Czar did not pass through a Polish town until the police and military had “ensured an enthusiastic reception.”  But in France, tyrants and love of country were mere words to draw applause from the country cousins in a popular theatre.

Felix, though a youth, stood a head and shoulders above the level of the weaklings excluded as “finished” from these commonplace educational institutions—­schools called colleges and colleges called universities, resulting necessarily from the proclamation of man’s equality.  He sickened at seeing the neutral-tinted lake of society, with “shallow-swells,” more painful to the right-minded than an ocean in a tempest.

He soon became like the French, but not so his wife.  She suffered the change of her unpronounceable name, being euphonized as “Cesarine,” smilingly, but life at home in a demure and tranquil suburb little suited the young meteor who had flashed across Germany.  Felix saw with dismay that domestic bliss was not that which she enjoyed.  For a while he hoped that she would content herself as his helpmate and the genius of the hearth when a mother.

But maternity had nothing but thorns for her.  She chafed under the burden and her joy was indecent when the little boy died.  Until then he had believed that the path of duty was wide enough and lined sufficiently with flowers to gratify or at least pacify her.

But Cesarine was, like her aunt, a born dissolvent of society’s vital elements.  Ruled by a strong hand, and removed from the pernicious influence of the vicious countess, her mother had never inculcated evil to her child; on the contrary, impressed by the lesson of Iza’s career, she had perhaps been too Puritanic with Cesarine, whose flight from home at an early age, was like the spring of a deer through a gap in a fence.  Cesarine, wherever placed, sapped morality, faith, labor and the family ties.