In Issoudun and its neighborhood there were a dozen officers in Max’s position.  These men admired him and made him their leader,—­with the exception, however, of Carpentier, his successor, and a certain Monsieur Mignonnet, ex-captain in the artillery of the Guard.  Carpentier, a cavalry officer risen from the ranks, had married into one of the best families in the town,—­the Borniche-Herau.  Mignonnet, brought up at the Ecole Polytechnique, had served in a corps which held itself superior to all others.  In the Imperial armies there were two shades of distinction among the soldiers themselves.  A majority of them felt a contempt for the bourgeois, the “civilian,” fully equal to the contempt of nobles for their serfs, or conquerors for the conquered.  Such men did not always observe the laws of honor in their dealings with civilians; nor did they much blame those who rode rough-shod over the bourgeoisie.  The others, and particularly the artillery, perhaps because of its republicanism, never adopted the doctrine of a military France and a civil France, the tendency of which was nothing less than to make two nations.  So, although Major Potel and Captain Renard, two officers living in the Rome suburb, were friends to Maxence Gilet “through thick and thin,” Major Mignonnet and Captain Carpentier took sides with the bourgeoisie, and thought his conduct unworthy of a man of honor.

Major Mignonnet, a lean little man, full of dignity, busied himself with the problems which the steam-engine requires us to solve, and lived in a modest way, taking his social intercourse with Monsieur and Madame Carpentier.  His gentle manners and ways, and his scientific occupations won him the respect of the whole town; and it was frequently said of him and of Captain Carpentier that they were “quite another thing” from Major Potel and Captain Renard, Maxence, and other frequenters of the cafe Militaire, who retained the soldierly manners and the defective morals of the Empire.

At the time when Madame Bridau returned to Issoudun, Max was excluded from the society of the place.  He showed, moreover, proper self-respect in never presenting himself at the club, and in never complaining of the severe reprobation that was shown him; although he was the handsomest, the most elegant, and the best dressed man in the place, spent a great deal of money, and kept a horse,—­a thing as amazing at Issoudun as the horse of Lord Byron at Venice.  We are now to see how it was that Maxence, poor and without apparent means, was able to become the dandy of the town.  The shameful conduct which earned him the contempt of all scrupulous or religious persons was connected with the interests which brought Agathe and Joseph to Issoudun.