Jean, on the other hand, wishing to attract only an elegant and opulent class, was anxious to captivate persons of refinement by his quiet and perfect taste.

And this discussion, which had gone on all day, began again with the soup.

Roland had no opinion.  He repeated:  “I do not want to hear anything about it.  I will go and see it when it is all finished.”

Mme. Roland appealed to the judgment of her elder son.

“And you, Pierre, what do you think of the matter?”

His nerves were in a state of such intense excitement that he would have liked to reply with an oath.  However, he only answered in a dry tone quivering with annoyance.

“Oh, I am quite of Jean’s mind.  I like nothing so well as simplicity, which, in matters of taste, is equivalent to rectitude in matters of conduct.”

His mother went on: 

“You must remember that we live in a city of commercial men, where good taste is not to be met with at every turn.”

Pierre replied: 

“What does that matter?  Is that a reason for living as fools do?  If my fellow-townsmen are stupid and ill-bred, need I follow their example?  A woman does not misconduct herself because her neighbour has a lover.”

Jean began to laugh.

“You argue by comparisons which seem to have been borrowed from the maxims of a moralist.”

Pierre made no reply.  His mother and his brother reverted to the question of stuffs and arm-chairs.

He sat looking at them as he had looked at his mother in the morning before starting for Trouville; looking at them as a stranger who would study them, and he felt as though he had really suddenly come into a family of which he knew nothing.

His father, above all, amazed his eyes and his mind.  That flabby, burly man, happy and besotted, was his own father!  No, no; Jean was not in the least like him.

His family!

Within these two days an unknown and malignant hand, the hand of a dead man, had torn asunder and broken, one by one, all the ties which had held these four human beings together.  It was all over, all ruined.  He had now no mother—­for he could no longer love her now that he could not revere her with that perfect, tender, and pious respect which a son’s love demands; no brother—­since his brother was the child of a stranger; nothing was left him but his father, that coarse man whom he could not love in spite of himself.

And he suddenly broke out: 

“I say, mother, have you found that portrait?”

She opened her eyes in surprise.

“What portrait?”

“The portrait of Marechal.”

“No—­that is to say—­yes—­I have not found it, but I think I know where it is.”

“What is that?” asked Roland.  And Pierre answered: 

“A little likeness of Marechal which used to be in the dining-room in Paris.  I thought that Jean might be glad to have it.”