he would scarcely leave more than eight or ten thousand francs a year to each of his children, four in number, for he had been married twice.  And besides, by the time that all “expectations,” as matchmakers call them, were realized, would not the magistrate have children of his own to settle in life?  Any one can imagine the situation for a little woman with plenty of sense and determination, and Mme. Camusot was such a woman.  She did not refrain from meddling in matters judicial.  She had far too strong a sense of the gravity of a false step in her husband’s career.

She was the only child of an old servant of Louis XVIII., a valet who had followed his master in his wanderings in Italy, Courland, and England, till after the Restoration the King awarded him with the one place that he could fill at Court, and made him usher by rotation to the royal cabinet.  So in Amelie’s home there had been, as it were, a sort of reflection of the Court.  Thirion used to tell her about the lords, and ministers, and great men whom he announced and introduced and saw passing to and fro.  The girl, brought up at the gates of the Tuileries, had caught some tincture of the maxims practised there, and adopted the dogma of passive obedience to authority.  She had sagely judged that her husband, by ranging himself on the side of the d’Esgrignons, would find favor with Mme. la Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and with two powerful families on whose influence with the King the Sieur Thirion could depend at an opportune moment.  Camusot might get an appointment at the first opportunity within the jurisdiction of Paris, and afterwards at Paris itself.  That promotion, dreamed of and longed for at every moment, was certain to have a salary of six thousand francs attached to it, as well as the alleviation of living in her own father’s house, or under the Camusots’ roof, and all the advantages of a father’s fortune on either side.  If the adage, “Out of sight is out of mind,” holds good of most women, it is particularly true where family feeling or royal or ministerial patronage is concerned.  The personal attendants of kings prosper at all times; you take an interest in a man, be it only a man in livery, if you see him every day.

Mme. Camusot, regarding herself as a bird of passage, had taken a little house in the Rue du Cygne.  Furnished lodgings there were none; the town was not enough of a thoroughfare, and the Camusots could not afford to live at an inn like M. Michu.  So the fair Parisian had no choice for it but to take such furniture as she could find; and as she paid a very moderate rent, the house was remarkably ugly, albeit a certain quaintness of detail was not wanting.  It was built against a neighboring house in such a fashion that the side with only one window in each story, gave upon the street, and the front looked out upon a yard where rose-bushes and buckhorn were growing along the wall on either side.  On the farther side, opposite the house, stood a shed, a roof over