“You have much more wit than you give yourself credit for.”

To which he received this answer:—­

“In any other career, my dear Theodose, I should have made my way nobly; but the fall of the Emperor broke my neck.”

“There is still time,” said the young lawyer.  “In the first place, what did that mountebank, Colleville, ever do to get the cross?”

There la Peyrade laid his finger on a sore wound which Thuillier hid from every eye so carefully that even his sister did not know of it; but the young man, interested in studying these bourgeois, had divined the secret envy that gnawed at the heart of the ex-official.

“If you, experienced as you are, will do the honor to follow my advice,” added the philanthropist, “and, above all, not mention our compact to any one, I will undertake to have you decorated with the Legion of honor, to the applause of the whole quarter.”

“Oh! if we succeed in that,” cried Thuillier, “you don’t know what I would do for you.”

This explains why Thuillier carried his head high when Theodose had the audacity that evening to put opinions into his mouth.

In art—­and perhaps Moliere had placed hypocrisy in the rank of art by classing Tartuffe forever among comedians—­there exists a point of perfection to which genius alone attains; mere talent falls below it.  There is so little difference between a work of genius and a work of talent, that only men of genius can appreciate the distance that separates Raffaelle from Correggio, Titian from Rubens.  More than that; common minds are easily deceived on this point.  The sign of genius is a certain appearance of facility.  In fact, its work must appear, at first sight, ordinary, so natural is it, even on the highest subjects.  Many peasant-women hold their children as the famous Madonna in the Dresden gallery holds hers.  Well, the height of art in a man of la Peyrade’s force was to oblige others to say of him later:  “Everybody would have been taken in by him.”

Now, in the salon Thuillier, he noted a dawning opposition; he perceived in Colleville the somewhat clear-sighted and criticising nature of an artist who has missed his vocation.  The barrister felt himself displeasing to Colleville, who (as the result of circumstances not necessary to here report) considered himself justified in believing in the science of anagrams.  None of this anagrams had ever failed.  The clerks in the government office had laughed at him when, demanding an anagram on the name of the poor helpless Auguste-Jean-Francois Minard, he had produced, “J’amassai une si grande fortune”; and the event had justified him after the lapse of ten years!  Theodose, on several occasions, had made advances to the jovial secretary of the mayor’s office, and had felt himself rebuffed by a coldness which was not natural in so sociable a man.  When the game of bouillotte came to an end, Colleville seized the moment to draw Thuillier into the recess of a window and say to him:—­