This woman, celebrated under the Directory for her liaison with one of the five kings of that reign, married, through that all-powerful protection, a purveyor who was making his millions out of the government, and whom Napoleon ruined in 1802.  This man, named Husson, became insane through his sudden fall from opulence to poverty; he flung himself into the Seine, leaving the beautiful Madame Husson pregnant.  Moreau, very intimately allied with Madame Husson, was at that time condemned to death; he was unable therefore to marry the widow, being forced to leave France.  Madame Husson, then twenty-two years old, married in her deep distress a government clerk named Clapart, aged twenty-seven, who was said to be a rising man.  At that period of our history, government clerks were apt to become persons of importance; for Napoleon was ever on the lookout for capacity.  But Clapart, though endowed by nature with a certain coarse beauty, proved to have no intelligence.  Thinking Madame Husson very rich, he feigned a great passion for her, and was simply saddled with the impossibility of satisfying either then or in the future the wants she had acquired in a life of opulence.  He filled, very poorly, a place in the Treasury that gave him a salary of eighteen hundred francs; which was all the new household had to live on.  When Moreau returned to France as the secretary of the Comte de Serizy he heard of Madame Husson’s pitiable condition, and he was able, before his own marriage, to get her an appointment as head-waiting-woman to Madame Mere, the Emperor’s mother.  But in spite of that powerful protection Clapart was never promoted; his incapacity was too apparent.

Ruined in 1815 by the fall of the Empire, the brilliant Aspasia of the Directory had no other resources than Clapart’s salary of twelve hundred francs from a clerkship obtained for him through the Comte de Serizy.  Moreau, the only protector of a woman whom he had known in possession of millions, obtained a half-scholarship for her son, Oscar Husson, at the school of Henri IV.; and he sent her regularly, by Pierrotin, such supplies from the estate at Presles as he could decently offer to a household in distress.

Oscar was the whole life and all the future of his mother.  The poor woman could now be reproached with no other fault than her exaggerated tenderness for her boy,—­the bete-noire of his step-father.  Oscar was, unfortunately, endowed by nature with a foolishness his mother did not perceive, in spite of the step-father’s sarcasms.  This foolishness —­or, to speak more specifically, this overweening conceit—­so troubled Monsieur Moreau that he begged Madame Clapart to send the boy down to him for a month that he might study his character, and find out what career he was fit for.  Moreau was really thinking of some day proposing Oscar to the count as his successor.