His marriage was the second cause of his obscurity.  As a man of forty, he was rash enough to marry a girl of eighteen, by whom he had a son named Joseph in the first year of their marriage.  Three years afterwards Mme. Blondet, then the prettiest woman in the town, inspired in the prefect of the department a passion which ended only with her death.  The prefect was the father of her second son Emile; the whole town knew this, old Blondet himself knew it.  The wife who might have roused her husband’s ambition, who might have won him away from his flowers, positively encouraged the judge in his botanical tastes.  She no more cared to leave the place than the prefect cared to leave his prefecture so long as his mistress lived.

Blondet felt himself unequal at his age to a contest with a young wife.  He sought consolation in his greenhouse, and engaged a very pretty servant-maid to assist him to tend his ever-changing bevy of beauties.  So while the judge potted, pricked out, watered, layered, slipped, blended, and induced his flowers to break, Mme. Blondet spent his substance on the dress and finery in which she shone at the prefecture.  One interest alone had power to draw her away from the tender care of a romantic affection which the town came to admire in the end; and this interest was Emile’s education.  The child of love was a bright and pretty boy, while Joseph was no less heavy and plain-featured.  The old judge, blinded by paternal affection loved Joseph as his wife loved Emile.

For a dozen years M. Blondet bore his lot with perfect resignation.  He shut his eyes to his wife’s intrigue with a dignified, well-bred composure, quite in the style of an eighteenth century grand seigneur; but, like all men with a taste for a quiet life, he could cherish a profound dislike, and he hated his younger son.  When his wife died, therefore, in 1818, he turned the intruder out of the house, and packed him off to Paris to study law on an allowance of twelve hundred francs for all resource, nor could any cry of distress extract another penny from his purse.  Emile Blondet would have gone under if it had not been for his real father.

M. Blondet’s house was one of the prettiest in the town.  It stood almost opposite the prefecture, with a neat little court in front.  A row of old-fashioned iron railings between two brick-work piers enclosed it from the street; and a low wall, also of brick, with a second row of railings along the top, connected the piers with the neighboring house.  The little court, a space about ten fathoms in width by twenty in length, was cut in two by a brick pathway which ran from the gate to the house door between a border on either side.  Those borders were always renewed; at every season of the year they exhibited a successful show of blossom, to the admiration of the public.  All along the back of the gardenbeds a quantity of climbing plants grew up and covered the walls of the neighboring houses with a magnificent mantle; the brick-work piers were hidden in clusters of honeysuckle; and, to crown all, in a couple of terra-cotta vases at the summit, a pair of acclimatized cactuses displayed to the astonished eyes of the ignorant those thick leaves bristling with spiny defences which seem to be due to some plant disease.