Max’s mother, the wife of a poor sabot-maker in the Rome suburb, was possessed, for the perdition of her soul, of a surprising beauty, a Trasteverine beauty, the only property which she transmitted to her son.  Madame Gilet, pregnant with Maxence in 1788, had long desired that blessing, which the town attributed to the gallantries of the two friends,—­probably in the hope of setting them against each other.  Gilet, an old drunkard with a triple throat, treated his wife’s misconduct with a collusion that is not uncommon among the lower classes.  To make sure of protectors for her son, Madame Gilet was careful not to enlighten his reputed fathers as to his parentage.  In Paris, she would have turned out a millionaire; at Issoudun she lived sometimes at her ease, more often miserably, and, in the long run, despised.  Madame Hochon, Lousteau’s sister, paid sixty francs a year for the lad’s schooling.  This liberality, which Madame Hochon was quite unable to practise on her own account because of her husband’s stinginess, was naturally attributed to her brother, then living at Sancerre.

When Doctor Rouget, who certainly was not lucky in sons, observed Max’s beauty, he paid the board of the “young rogue,” as he called him, at the seminary, up to the year 1805.  As Lousteau died in 1800, and the doctor apparently obeyed a feeling of vanity in paying the lad’s board until 1805, the question of the paternity was left forever undecided.  Maxence Gilet, the butt of many jests, was soon forgotten, —­and for this reason:  In 1806, a year after Doctor Rouget’s death, the lad, who seemed to have been created for a venturesome life, and was moreover gifted with remarkable vigor and agility, got into a series of scrapes which more or less threatened his safety.  He plotted with the grandsons of Monsieur Hochon to worry the grocers of the city; he gathered fruit before the owners could pick it, and made nothing of scaling walls.  He had no equal at bodily exercises, he played base to perfection, and could have outrun a hare.  With a keen eye worthy of Leather-stocking, he loved hunting passionately.  His time was passed in firing at a mark, instead of studying; and he spent the money extracted from the old doctor in buying powder and ball for a wretched pistol that old Gilet, the sabot-maker, had given him.  During the autumn of 1806, Maxence, then seventeen, committed an involuntary murder, by frightening in the dusk a young woman who was pregnant, and who came upon him suddenly while stealing fruit in her garden.  Threatened with the guillotine by Gilet, who doubtless wanted to get rid of him, Max fled to Bourges, met a regiment then on its way to Egypt, and enlisted.  Nothing came of the death of the young woman.