At this moment carriage-wheels were heard, and a hackney-coach containing Oscar and all his worldly belongings stopped before the door.  The luckless young man came up at once.

“Ah! here you are, Monsieur Joli-Coeur!” cried Clapart.

Oscar kissed his mother, and held out to Moreau a hand which the latter refused to take.  To this rebuff Oscar replied by a reproachful look, the boldness of which he had never shown before.  Then he turned on Clapart.

“Listen to me, monsieur,” said the youth, transformed into a man.  “You worry my poor mother devilishly, and that’s your right, for she is, unfortunately, your wife.  But as for me, it is another thing.  I shall be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a minor.  I have never asked anything of you.  Thanks to Monsieur Moreau, I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude.  Therefore, I say, let me alone!”

Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the chimney corner.  The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man, who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced the imbecile mind of the sick man.

“A momentary temptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at my age,” said Oscar to Moreau, “has made me commit a fault which Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo.  I am more provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over.  This time, at any rate, I’ve hurt no one by myself.  I’m cured of such things forever.  If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can get a practice shall be spent without—­”

“Stop there!” said Moreau.  “I have three children, and I can make no promises.”

“Never mind, never mind,” said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a reproachful glance at Moreau.  “Your uncle Cardot—­”

“I have no longer an uncle Cardot,” replied Oscar, who related the scene at the rue de Vendome.

Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if struck by lightning.

“All the miseries together!” she said, as she fainted.

Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in her chamber.  Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed.

“There is nothing left for you,” said Moreau, coming back to him, “but to make yourself a soldier.  That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as though he couldn’t live three months, and then your mother will be without a penny.  Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little money I am able to give?  It was impossible to tell you this before her.  As a soldier, you’ll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as it is to those who are born into it without fortune.”