When the little Jansoulets went out to visit their parents at home, they were intrusted to the care of the man with the red fez, the indispensable Bompain.  It was Bompain who conducted them to the Champs-Elysees, clad in English jackets, bowler hats of the latest fashion—­at seven years old!—­and carrying little canes in their dog-skin-gloved hands.  It was Bompain who stuffed the race-wagonette with provisions.  Here he mounted with the children, who, with their entrance-cards stuck in their hats round which green veils were twisted, looked very like those personages in Liliputian pantomimes whose entire funniness lies in the enormous size of their heads compared with their small legs and dwarf-like gestures.  They smoked and drank; it was a painful sight.  Sometimes the man in the fez, hardly able to hold himself upright, would bring them home frightfully sick.  And yet Jansoulet was fond of them, the youngest especially, who, with his long hair, his doll-like manner, recalled to him the little Afchin passing in her carriage.  But they were still of the age when children belong to the mother, when neither the fashionable tailor, nor the most accomplished masters, nor the smart boarding-school, nor the ponies girthed specially for the little men in the stable, nor anything else can replace the attentive and caressing hand, the warmth and the gaiety of the home-nest.  The father could not give them that; and then, too, he was so busy!

A thousand irons in the fire:  the Territorial Bank, the installation of the picture gallery, drives to Tattersall’s with Bois l’Hery, some bibelot to inspect, here or there, at the houses of collectors indicated by Schwalbach, hours passed with trainers, jockeys, dealers in curiosities, the encumbered and multiple existence of a bourgeois gentilhomme in modern Paris.  This rubbing of shoulders with all sorts and conditions of people brought him improvement, in that each day he was becoming a little more Parisianized; he was received at Monpavon’s club, in the green-room of the ballet, behind the scenes at the theatres, and presided regularly at his famous bachelor luncheons, the only receptions possible in his household.  His existence was really a very busy one, and de Gery relieved him of the heaviest part of it, the complicated department of appeals and of charities.

The young man now became acquainted with all the audacious and burlesque inventions, all the serio-comic combinations of that mendicancy of great cities, organized like a department of state, innumerable as an army, which subscribes to the newspapers and knows its Bottin by heart.  He received the blonde lady, bold, young, and already faded, who only asks for a hundred napoleons, with the threat that she will throw herself into the river when she leaves if they are not given to her, and the stout matron of prepossessing and unceremonious manner, who says, as she enters:  “Sir, you do not know me.  Neither have I