This beautiful dream warmed the young man’s heart, and he reached his home joyous and happy.  He gave a vigorous pull to the bell, climbed quickly up the long flights of stairs and opened the door to their apartment.  But what was this?  His father must have come home very late, for a stream of light shines under the door of his sleeping-room.

“Poor man!” thought Amedee, recalling the scene of the morning.  “He may be ill.  Let us see.”

He had hardly opened the door, when he drew back uttering a shriek of horror and distress.  By the light of a candle that burned upon the mantel, Amedee had caught sight of his father extended upon the floor, his shirt disordered and covered with blood, holding in his clenched right hand the razor with which he had cut his throat.

Yes! the union of two loving hearts had at last taken place.  Their love was happiness on earth; but if one of the two dies the other can never be consoled while life lasts.

M. Violette never was consoled.

CHAPTER IX

THORNS OF JEALOUSY

Now Amedee had no family.  The day after his father’s death he had a violent rupture with M. Isidore Gaufre.  Under the pretext that a suicide horrified him, he allowed his niece’s husband to be carried to the cemetery in a sixth-class hearse, and did not honor with his presence the funeral, which was even prohibited from using the parish road.  But the saintly man was not deterred from swallowing for his dinner that same day, while thundering against the progress of materialism, tripe cooked after the Caen fashion, one of Berenice’s weekly works of art.

Amedee had now no family, and his friends were dispersed.  As a reward for passing his examinations in law, Madame Roger took her son with her on a trip to Italy, and they had just left France together.

As to the poor Gerards, just one month after M. Violette’s death, the old engraver died suddenly, of apoplexy, at his work; and on that day there were not fifty francs in the house.  Around the open grave where they lowered the obscure and honest artist, there was only a group of three women, in black, who were weeping, and Amedee in mourning for his father, with a dozen of Gerard’s old comrades, whose romantic heads had become gray.  The family was obliged to sell at once, in order to get a little money, what remained of proof-sheets in the boxes, some small paintings, old presents from artist friends who had become celebrated, and the last of the ruined knickknacks—­indeed, all that constituted the charm of the house.  Then, in order that her eldest daughter might not be so far from the boarding-school where she was employed as teacher of music, Madame Gerard went to live in the Rue St.-Pierre, in Montmartre, where they found a little cheap, first-floor apartment, with a garden as large as one’s hand.

Now that he was reduced to his one hundred and twenty-five francs, Amedee was obliged to leave his too expensive apartment in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and to sell the greater part of his family furniture.  He kept only his books and enough to furnish his little room, perched under the roof of an old house in the Faubourg St.-Jacques.