The causes of David’s heedlessness throw a light on the character of that young man.  Only a few days after his establishment in the paternal printing office, he came across an old school friend in the direst poverty.  Lucien Chardon, a young fellow of one-and-twenty or thereabouts, was the son of a surgeon-major who had retired with a wound from the republican army.  Nature had meant M. Chardon senior for a chemist; chance opened the way for a retail druggist’s business in Angouleme.  After many years of scientific research, death cut him off in the midst of his incompleted experiments, and the great discovery that should have brought wealth to the family was never made.  Chardon had tried to find a specific for the gout.  Gout is a rich man’s malady; the rich will pay large sums to recover health when they have lost it, and for this reason the druggist deliberately selected gout as his problem.  Halfway between the man of science on the one side and the charlatan on the other, he saw that the scientific method was the one road to assured success, and had studied the causes of the complaint, and based his remedy on a certain general theory of treatment, with modifications in practice for varying temperaments.  Then, on a visit to Paris undertaken to solicit the approval of the Academie des Sciences, he died, and lost all the fruits of his labors.

It may have been that some presentiment of the end had led the country druggist to do all that in him lay to give his boy and girl a good education; the family had been living up to the income brought in by the business; and now when they were left almost destitute, it was an aggravation of their misfortune that they had been brought up in the expectations of a brilliant future; for these hopes were extinguished by their father’s death.  The great Desplein, who attended Chardon in his last illness, saw him die in convulsions of rage.

The secret of the army surgeon’s ambition lay in his passionate love for his wife, the last survivor of the family of Rubempre, saved as by a miracle from the guillotine in 1793.  He had gained time by declaring that she was pregnant, a lie told without the girl’s knowledge or consent.  Then, when in a manner he had created a claim to call her his wife, he had married her in spite of their common poverty.  The children of this marriage, like all children of love, inherited the mother’s wonderful beauty, that gift so often fatal when accompanied by poverty.  The life of hope and hard work and despair, in all of which Mme. Chardon had shared with such keen sympathy, had left deep traces in her beautiful face, just as the slow decline of a scanty income had changed her ways and habits; but both she and her children confronted evil days bravely enough.  She sold the druggist’s shop in the Grand’ Rue de L’Houmeau, the principal suburb of Angouleme; but it was impossible for even one woman to exist on the three hundred francs of income brought in by