As soon as Madame Colleville recovered she said to Thuillier, frankly, in a very serious tone:—­

“My dear friend, if we are all to remain good friends, you must be our friend only.  Colleville is attached to you; well, that’s enough for you in this household.”

“Explain to me,” said the handsome Thuillier to Tullia after this remark, “why women are never attached to me.  I am not the Apollo Belvidere, but for all that I’m not a Vulcan; I am passably good-looking, I have sense, I am faithful—­”

“Do you want me to tell you the truth?” replied Tullia.

“Yes,” said Thuillier.

“Well, though we can, sometimes, love a stupid fellow, we never love a silly one.”

Those words killed Thuillier; he never got over them; henceforth he was a prey to melancholy and accused all women of caprice.

The secretary-general of the ministry, des Lupeaulx, whose influence Madame Colleville thought greater than it was, and of whom she said, later, “That was one of my mistakes,” became for a time the great man of the Colleville salon; but as Flavie found he had no power to promote Colleville into the upper division, she had the good sense to resent des Lupeaulx’s attentions to Madame Rabourdin (whom she called a minx), to whose house she had never been invited, and who had twice had the impertinence not to come to the Colleville concerts.

Madame Colleville was deeply affected by the death of young Gondreville; she felt, she said, the finger of God.  In 1824 she turned over a new leaf, talked of economy, stopped her receptions, busied herself with her children, determined to become a good mother of a family; no favorite friend was seen at her house.  She went to church, reformed her dress, wore gray, and talked Catholicism, mysticism, and so forth.  All this produced, in 1825, another little son, whom she named Theodore.  Soon after, in 1826, Colleville was appointed sub-director of the Clergeot division, and later, in 1828, collector of taxes in a Paris arrondissement.  He also received the cross of the Legion of honor, to enable him to put his daughter at the royal school of Saint-Denis.  The half-scholarship obtained by Keller for the eldest boy, Charles, was transferred to the second in 1830, when Charles entered the school of Saint-Louis on a full scholarship.  The third son, taken under the protection of Madame la Dauphine, was provided with a three-quarter scholarship in the Henri IV. school.

In 1830 Colleville, who had the good fortune not to lose a child, was obliged, owing to his well-known attachment to the fallen royal family, to send in his resignation; but he was clever enough to make a bargain for it,—­obtaining in exchange a pension of two thousand four hundred francs, based on his period of service, and ten thousand francs indemnity paid by his successor; he also received the rank of officer of the Legion of honor.  Nevertheless, he found himself in rather a cramped condition when