Celeste endeared herself by precious qualities; she was kind, simple, without gall of any kind; she loved her father and mother, and would willingly sacrifice herself for their sake.  Brought up to the deepest admiration for her godfather by Brigitte (who taught her to say “Aunt Brigitte"), and by Madame Thuillier and her own mother, Celeste imbibed the highest idea of the ex-beau of the Empire.  The house in the rue Saint-Dominique d’Enfer produced upon her very much the effect of the Chateau des Tuileries on a courtier of the new dynasty.

Thuillier had not escaped the action of the administrative rolling-pin which thins the mind as it spreads it out.  Exhausted by irksome toil, as much as by his life of gallantry, the ex-sub-director had well-nigh lost all his faculties by the time he came to live in the rue Saint-Dominique.  But his weary face, on which there still reigned an air of imperial haughtiness, mingled with a certain contentment, the conceit of an upper official, made a deep impression upon Celeste.  She alone adored that haggard face.  The girl, moreover, felt herself to be the happiness of the Thuillier household.

CHAPTER IV

The circle of monsieur and madame Thuillier

The Collevilles and their children became, naturally, the nucleus of the circle which Mademoiselle Thuillier had the ambition to group around her brother.  A former clerk in the Billardiere division of the ministry, named Phellion, had lived for the last thirty years in their present quarter.  He was promptly greeted by Colleville and Thuillier at the first review.  Phellion proved to be one of the most respected men in the arrondissement.  He had one daughter, now married to a school-teacher in the rue Saint-Hyacinthe, a Monsieur Barniol.  Phellion’s eldest son was a professor of mathematics in a royal college; he gave lectures and private lessons, being devoted, so his father was wont to say, to pure mathematics.  A second son was in the government School of Engineering.  Phellion had a pension of nine hundred francs, and he possessed a little property of nine thousand and a few odd hundred francs; the fruit of his economy and that of his wife during thirty years of toil and privation.  He was, moreover, the owner of a little house and garden where he lived in the “impasse” des Feuillantines,—­in thirty years he had never used the old-fashioned word “cul-de-sac”!

Dutocq, the clerk of the justice of peace, was also a former employee at the ministry of finance.  Sacrificed, in former days, to one of those necessities which are always met with in representative government, he had accepted the position of scapegoat, receiving, privately, a round sum of money and the opportunity to buy his present post of clerk in the arrondissement.  This man, not very honorable, and known to be a spy in the government offices, was never welcomed as he