Colleville was the only son of a talented musician, formerly first violin at the Opera under Francoeur and Rebel, who related, at least six times a month during his lifetime, anecdotes concerning the representations of the “Village Seer”; and mimicked Jean-Jacques Rousseau, taking him off to perfection.  Colleville and Thuillier were inseparable friends; they had no secrets from each other, and their friendship, begun at fifteen years of age, had never known a cloud up to the year 1839.  The former was one of those employees who are called, in the government offices, pluralists.  These clerks are remarkable for their industry.  Colleville, a good musician, owed to the name and influence of his father a situation as first clarionet at the Opera-Comique, and so long as he was a bachelor, Colleville, who was rather richer than Thuillier, shared his means with his friend.  But, unlike Thuillier, Colleville married for love a Mademoiselle Flavie, the natural daughter of a celebrated danseuse at the Opera; her reputed father being a certain du Bourguier, one of the richest contractors of the day.  In style and origin, Flavie was apparently destined for a melancholy career, when Colleville, often sent to her mother’s apartments, fell in love with her and married her.  Prince Galathionne, who at that time was “protecting” the danseuse, then approaching the end of her brilliant career, gave Flavie a “dot” of twenty thousand francs, to which her mother added a magnificent trousseau.  Other friends and opera-comrades sent jewels and silver-ware, so that the Colleville household was far richer in superfluities than in capital.  Flavie, brought up in opulence, began her married life in a charming apartment, furnished by her mother’s upholsterer, where the young wife, who was full of taste for art and for artists, and possessed a certain elegance, ruled, a queen.

Madame Colleville was pretty and piquant, clever, gay, and graceful; to express her in one sentence,—­a charming creature.  Her mother, the danseuse, now forty-three years old, retired from the stage and went to live in the country,—­thus depriving her daughter of the resources derived from her wasteful extravagance.  Madame Colleville kept a very agreeable but extremely free and easy household.  From 1816 to 1826 she had five children.  Colleville, a musician in the evening, kept the books of a merchant from seven to nine in the morning, and by ten o’clock he was at his ministry.  Thus, by blowing into a bit of wood by night, and writing double-entry accounts in the early morning, he managed to eke out his earnings to seven or eight thousand francs a year.