the investment of the purchase-money, so the mother and daughter accepted the position, and worked to earn a living.  The mother went out as a monthly nurse, and for her gentle manners was preferred to any other among the wealthy houses, where she lived without expense to her children, and earned some seven francs a week.  To save her son the embarrassment of seeing his mother reduced to this humble position, she assumed the name of Madame Charlotte; and persons requiring her services were requested to apply to M. Postel, M. Chardon’s successor in the business.  Lucien’s sister worked for a laundress, a decent woman much respected in L’Houmeau, and earned fifteen daily sous.  As Mme. Prieur’s forewoman she had a certain position in the workroom, which raised her slightly above the class of working-girls.

The two women’s slender earnings, together with Mme. Chardon’s three hundred francs of rentes, amounted to about eight hundred francs a year, and on this sum three persons must be fed, clothed, and lodged.  Yet, with all their frugal thrift, the pittance was scarcely sufficient; nearly the whole of it was needed for Lucien.  Mme. Chardon and her daughter Eve believed in Lucien as Mahomet’s wife believed in her husband; their devotion for his future knew no bounds.  Their present landlord was the successor to the business, for M. Postel let them have rooms at the further end of a yard at the back of the laboratory for a very low rent, and Lucien slept in the poor garret above.  A father’s passion for natural science had stimulated the boy, and at first induced him to follow in the same path.  Lucien was one of the most brilliant pupils at the grammar school of Angouleme, and when David Sechard left, his future friend was in the third form.

When chance brought the school-fellows together again, Lucien was weary of drinking from the rude cup of penury, and ready for any of the rash, decisive steps that youth takes at the age of twenty.  David’s generous offer of forty francs a month if Lucien would come to him and learn the work of a printer’s reader came in time; David had no need whatever of a printer’s reader, but he saved Lucien from despair.  The ties of a school friendship thus renewed were soon drawn closer than ever by the similarity of their lot in life and the dissimilarity of their characters.  Both felt high swelling hopes of manifold success; both consciously possessed the high order of intelligence which sets a man on a level with lofty heights, consigned though they were socially to the lowest level.  Fate’s injustice was a strong bond between them.  And then, by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had attained to poesy.  Lucien, destined for the highest speculative fields of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame through literature; while David, with that meditative temperament which inclines to poetry, was drawn by his tastes towards natural science.