“Justin’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Chevassat, now concierges of No. 23 Water Street, were, some thirty-eight or forty years ago, living in the upper part of the suburb of Saint Honore.  They had a very modest little shop, partly restaurant, partly bar:  their customers were generally the servants of the neighborhood.  They were people of easy principles and loose morals,—­as there are so many in our day,—­honest enough as long as there is nothing to be gained by being otherwise.  As their trade prospered, they were not dishonest; and, when any of their customers forgot their portemonnaies at the shop, they always returned them.  The husband was twenty-four, and the wife nineteen years old, when, to their great joy, a son was born.  There was rejoicing in the shop; and the child was christened Justin, in honor of his godfather, who was no less a personage than the valet of the Marquis de Brevan.

“But to have a son is a small matter.  To bring him up till he is seven or eight years old, is nothing.  The difficulty is to give him an education which shall secure him a position in the world.  This thought now began to occupy the minds of his parents incessantly.  These stupid people, who had a business which supported them handsomely, and enabled them, in the course of time, to amass a small fortune, did not see that the best thing they could have done would have been to enlarge it, and to leave it to their son.  But no.  They vowed they would sacrifice all their savings, and deprive themselves even of the necessaries of life, in order that their Justin might become a ‘gentleman.’

“And what a gentleman!  The mother dreamed of him as a rich broker, or, at the very least, a notary’s first clerk.  The father preferred seeing him a government official, holding one of those much-coveted places, which give the owner, after twenty-five years’ service, a title, and an income of some six or seven hundred dollars.

“The result of all these speculations was, that, at the age of nine, Master Justin was sent to a high school.  He conducted himself there just badly enough to be perpetually on the brink of being sent away, without ever being really expelled.  This made but little impression upon the two Chevassats.  They had become so accustomed to look upon their son as a superior being, that it never entered their mind to think he was not the first, the best, and the most remarkable pupil of the establishment.  If Justin’s reports were bad,—­and they were always bad,—­they accused the teachers of partiality.  If he gained no prize at the end of the year,—­and he never got any,—­they did not know what to do for him to console him for having been victimized by such cruel injustice.

“The consequences of such a system need hardly be stated.

“When Justin was fourteen years old, he despised his parents thoroughly, treated them like servants, and was so much ashamed of them, that he would not allow his mother to come and see him in the parlor of the college to which he had been admitted of late.  When he was at home during vacations, he would have cut his right arm off rather than help his father, or pour out a glass of wine for a customer.  He even stayed away from the house on the plea that he could not endure the odors from the kitchen.