Two days before his return to Paris, Eugene met his brother Aristide, on the Cours Sauvaire, and the latter accompanied him for a short distance with the importunity of a man in search of advice.  As a matter of fact, Aristide was in great perplexity.  Ever since the proclamation of the Republic, he had manifested the most lively enthusiasm for the new government.  His intelligence, sharpened by two years’ stay at Paris, enabled him to see farther than the thick heads of Plassans.  He divined the powerlessness of the Legitimists and Orleanists, without clearly distinguishing, however, what third thief would come and juggle the Republic away.  At all hazard he had ranged himself on the side of the victors, and he had severed his connection with his father, whom he publicly denounced as an old fool, an old dolt whom the nobility had bamboozled.

“Yet my mother is an intelligent woman,” he would add.  “I should never have thought her capable of inducing her husband to join a party whose hopes are simply chimerical.  They are taking the right course to end their lives in poverty.  But then women know nothing about politics.”

For his part he wanted to sell himself as dearly as possible.  His great anxiety as to the direction in which the wind was blowing, so that he might invariably range himself on the side of that party, which, in the hour of triumph, would be able to reward him munificently.  Unfortunately, he was groping in the dark.  Shut up in his far away province, without a guide, without any precise information, he felt quite lost.  While waiting for events to trace out a sure and certain path, he preserved the enthusiastic republican attitude which he had assumed from the very first day.  Thanks to this demeanour, he remained at the Sub-Prefecture; and his salary was even raised.  Burning, however, with the desire to play a prominent part, he persuaded a bookseller, one of Vuillet’s rivals, to establish a democratic journal, to which he became one of the most energetic contributors.  Under his impulse the “Independant” waged merciless warfare against the reactionaries.  But the current gradually carried him further than he wished to go; he ended by writing inflammatory articles, which made him shudder when he re-perused them.  It was remarked at Plassans that he directed a series of attacks against all whom his father was in the habit of receiving of an evening in his famous yellow drawing-room.  The fact is that the wealth of Roudier and Granoux exasperated Aristide to such a degree as to make him forget all prudence.  Urged on by his jealous, insatiate bitterness, he had already made the middle classes his irreconcilable enemy, when Eugene’s arrival and demeanour at Plassans caused him great consternation.  He confessed to himself that his brother was a skilful man.  According to him, that big, drowsy fellow always slept with one eye open, like a cat lying in wait before a mouse-hole.  And now here was Eugene spending