From year to year old Hochon grew more petty in his meanness, and more penurious; and at this time he was eighty-five years old.  He belonged to the class of men who stop short in the street, in the middle of a lively dialogue, and stoop to pick up a pin, remarking, as they stick it in the sleeve of their coat, “There’s the wife’s stipend.”  He complained bitterly of the poor quality of the cloth manufactured now-a-days, and called attention to the fact that his coat had lasted only ten years.  Tall, gaunt, thin, and sallow; saying little, reading little, and doing nothing to fatigue himself; as observant of forms as an oriental,—­he enforced in his own house a discipline of strict abstemiousness, weighing and measuring out the food and drink of the family, which, indeed, was rather numerous, and consisted of his wife, nee Lousteau, his grandson Borniche with a sister Adolphine, the heirs of old Borniche, and lastly, his other grandson, Francois Hochon.

Hochon’s eldest son was taken by the draft of 1813, which drew in the sons of well-to-do families who had escaped the regular conscription, and were now formed into a corps styled the “guards of honor.”  This heir-presumptive, who was killed at Hanau, had married early in life a rich woman, intending thereby to escape all conscriptions; but after he was enrolled, he wasted his substance, under a presentiment of his end.  His wife, who followed the army at a distance, died at Strasburg in 1814, leaving debts which her father-in-law Hochon refused to pay, —­answering the creditors with an axiom of ancient law, “Women are minors.”

The house, though large, was scantily furnished; on the second floor, however, there were two rooms suitable for Madame Bridau and Joseph.  Old Hochon now repented that he had kept them furnished with two beds, each bed accompanied by an old armchair of natural wood covered with needlework, and a walnut table, on which figured a water-pitcher of the wide-mouthed kind called “gueulard,” standing in a basin with a blue border.  The old man kept his winter store of apples and pears, medlars and quinces on heaps of straw in these rooms, where the rats and mice ran riot, so that they exhaled a mingled odor of fruit and vermin.  Madame Hochon now directed that everything should be cleaned; the wall-paper, which had peeled off in places, was fastened up again with wafers; and she decorated the windows with little curtains which she pieced together from old hoards of her own.  Her husband having refused to let her buy a strip of drugget, she laid down her own bedside carpet for her little Agathe,—­“Poor little thing!” as she called the mother, who was now over forty-seven years old.  Madame Hochon borrowed two night-tables from a neighbor, and boldly hired two chests of drawers with brass handles from a dealer in second-hand furniture who lived next to Mere Cognette.  She herself had preserved two pairs of candlesticks, carved in choice woods by her own father, who had the “turning” mania.