this state of wreckage, stupefied and paralyzed—­killing his father with sorrow, and forcing his mother to sell her all, and live as a sort of char-woman in the better-class houses of her own country-side.  Lucky it was that just then, when this broken piece of humanity, discharged from all the hospitals of Paris, was sent back by public charity to Bourg-Saint-Andeol, Bernard—­he whom they called Cadet, as in these southern families, half Arab as they are, the eldest always takes the family name, and the last-comer that of Cadet—­Bernard was at Tunis making his fortune, and sending home money regularly.  But what pain it was for the poor mother to owe everything, even the life, the comfort of the sad invalid, to the robust and courageous boy whom his father and she had loved without any tenderness; who, since he was five years old, they had treated as a “hand,” because he was very strong, woolly-headed, and ugly, and even then knew better than any one in the house how to deal in old nails.  Ah! how she longed to have him near her, her Cadet, to make some return to him for all the good he did, to pay at last the debt of love and motherly tenderness that she owed him!

But, you see, these princely fortunes have the burdens, the wearinesses of royal lives.  This poor mother, in her dazzling surroundings, was very like a real queen:  familiar with long exiles, cruel separations, and the trials which detract from greatness; one of her sons forever stupefied, the other far away, seldom writing, absorbed in his business, saying, “I will come,” and never coming.  She had only seen him once in twelve years, and then in the whirl of a visit of the Bey to Saint-Romans—­a rush of horses and carriages, of fireworks, and of banquets.  He had gone in the suite of his monarch, having scarcely time to say good-bye to his old mother, to whom there remained of this great joy only a few pictures in the illustrated papers, showing Bernard Jansoulet arriving at the castle with Ahmed, and presenting his mother.  Is it not thus that kings and queens have their family feelings exploited in the journals?  There was also a cedar of Lebanon, brought from the other end of the world, a regular mountain of a tree, whose transport had been as difficult and as costly as that of Cleopatra’s needle, and whose erection as a souvenir of the royal visit by dint of men, money, and teams had shaken the very foundations.  But this time, at least, knowing him to be in France for several months—­perhaps for good—­she hoped to have her Bernard to herself.  And now he returned to her, one fine evening, enveloped in the same triumphant glory, in the same official display, surrounded by a crowd of counts, of marquises, of fine gentlemen from Paris, filling, they and their servants, the two large wagonettes she had sent to meet them at the little station of Giffas on the other side of the Rhone.