Florent, although on friendly terms with the assistants, petted by his brother, and cordially treated by Lisa, presently began to feel very bored.  He had tried, but without success, to obtain some pupils; moreover, he purposely avoided the students’ quarter for fear of being recognised.  Lisa gently suggested to him that he had better try to obtain a situation in some commercial house, where he could take charge of the correspondence and keep the books.  She returned to this subject again and again, and at last offered to find a berth for him herself.  She was gradually becoming impatient at finding him so often in her way, idle, and not knowing what to do with himself.  At first this impatience was merely due to the dislike she felt of people who do nothing but cross their arms and eat, and she had no thought of reproaching him for consuming her substance.

“For my own part,” she would say to him, “I could never spend the whole day in dreamy lounging.  You can’t have any appetite for your meals.  You ought to tire yourself.”

Gavard, also, was seeking a situation for Florent, but in a very extraordinary and most mysterious fashion.  He would have liked to find some employment of a dramatic character, or in which there should be a touch of bitter irony, as was suitable for an outlaw.  Gavard was a man who was always in opposition.  He had just completed his fiftieth year, and he boasted that he had already passed judgment on four Governments.  He still contemptuously shrugged his shoulders at the thought of Charles X, the priests and nobles and other attendant rabble, whom he had helped to sweep away.  Louis Philippe, with his bourgeois following, had been an imbecile, and he could tell how the citizen-king had hoarded his coppers in a woollen stocking.  As for the Republic of ’48, that had been a mere farce, the working classes had deceived him; however, he no longer acknowledged that he had applauded the Coup d’Etat, for he now looked upon Napoleon III as his personal enemy, a scoundrel who shut himself up with Morny and others to indulge in gluttonous orgies.  He was never weary of holding forth upon this subject.  Lowering his voice a little, he would declare that women were brought to the Tuileries in closed carriages every evening, and that he, who was speaking, had one night heard the echoes of the orgies while crossing the Place du Carrousel.  It was Gavard’s religion to make himself as disagreeable as possible to any existing Government.  He would seek to spite it in all sorts of ways, and laugh in secret for several months at the pranks he played.  To begin with, he voted for candidates who would worry the Ministers at the Corps Legislatif.  Then, if he could rob the revenue, or baffle the police, and bring about a row of some kind or other, he strove to give the affair as much of an insurrectionary character as possible.  He told a great many lies, too; set himself up as being a very dangerous man; talked as though “the satellites of the Tuileries”