Such discussions were not calculated to make the relations between father and son more cordial.  Several times M. Favoral had insinuated, that, since Maxence lodged away from home, he might as well dine away too.  And he would evidently have notified him to do so, had he not been prevented by a remnant of human respect, and the fear of gossip.

On the other hand, the bitter regret of having, perhaps, spoiled his life, the uncertainty of the future, the penury of the moment, all the unsatisfied desires of youth, kept Maxence in a state of perpetual irritation.

The excellent Mme. Favoral exhausted all her arguments to quiet him.

“Your father is harsh for us,” she said; “but is he less harsh for himself?  He forgives nothing; but he has never needed to be forgiven himself.  He does not understand youth, but he has never been young himself; and at twenty he was as grave and as cold as you see him now.  How could he know what pleasure is?—­he to whom the idea has never come to take an hour’s enjoyment.”

“Have I, then, been guilty of any crimes, to be thus treated by my father?” exclaimed Maxence, flushed with anger.  “Our existence here is an unheard-of thing.  You, poor, dear mother!—­you have never had the free disposition of a five-franc-piece.  Gilberte spends her days turning her dresses, after having had them dyed.  I am driven to a petty clerkship.  And my father has fifty thousand francs a year!”

Such, indeed, was the figure at which the most moderate estimated M. Favoral’s fortune.  M. Chapelain, who was supposed to be well informed, insinuated freely that his friend Vincent, besides being the cashier of the Mutual Credit, must also be one of its principal stock-holders.  Now, judging from the dividend which had just been paid, the Mutual Credit must, since the war, have realized enormous profits.  All its enterprises were successful; and it was on the point of negotiating a foreign loan which would infallibly fill its exchequer to overflowing.

M. Favoral, moreover, defended himself feebly from these accusations of concealed opulence.  When M. Desormeaux told him, “Come, now, between us, candidly, how many millions have you?” he had such a strange way of affirming that people were very much mistaken, that his friends’ convictions became only the more settled.  And, as soon as they had a few thousand francs of savings, they promptly brought them to him, imitated in this by a goodly number of the small capitalists of the neighborhood, who were wont to remark among themselves,

“That man is safer than the bank!”

Millionaire or otherwise, the cashier of the Mutual Credit became daily more difficult to live with.  If strangers, those who had with him but a superficial intercourse, if the Saturday guests themselves, discovered in him no appreciable change, his wife and his children followed with anxious surprise the modifications of his humor.