Florent was fated to revert to politics.  He had suffered too much through them not to make them the dearest occupation of his life.  Under other conditions he might have become a good provincial schoolmaster, happy in the peaceful life of some little town.  But he had been treated as though he were a wolf, and felt as though he had been marked out by exile for some great combative task.  His nervous discomfort was the outcome of his long reveries at Cayenne, the brooding bitterness he had felt at his unmerited sufferings, and the vows he had secretly sworn to avenge humanity and justice—­the former scourged with a whip, and the latter trodden under foot.  Those colossal markets and their teeming odoriferous masses of food had hastened the crisis.  To Florent they appeared symbolical of some glutted, digesting beast, of Paris, wallowing in its fat and silently upholding the Empire.  He seemed to be encircled by swelling forms and sleek, fat faces, which ever and ever protested against his own martyrlike scragginess and sallow, discontented visage.  To him the markets were like the stomach of the shopkeeping classes, the stomach of all the folks of average rectitude puffing itself out, rejoicing, glistening in the sunshine, and declaring that everything was for the best, since peaceable people had never before grown so beautifully fat.  As these thoughts passed through his mind Florent clenched his fists, and felt ready for a struggle, more irritated now by the thought of his exile than he had been when he first returned to France.  Hatred resumed entire possession of him.  He often let his pen drop and became absorbed in dreams.  The dying fire cast a bright glow upon his face; the lamp burned smokily, and the chaffinch fell asleep again on one leg, with its head tucked under its wing.

Sometimes Auguste, on coming upstairs at eleven o’clock and seeing the light shining under the door, would knock, before going to bed.  Florent admitted him with some impatience.  The assistant sat down in front of the fire, speaking but little, and never saying why he had come.  His eyes would all the time remain fixed upon the photograph of himself and Augustine in their Sunday finery.  Florent came to the conclusion that the young man took a pleasure in visiting the room for the simple reason that it had been occupied by his sweetheart; and one evening he asked him with a smile if he had guessed rightly.

“Well, perhaps it is so,” replied Auguste, very much surprised at the discovery which he himself now made of the reasons which actuated him.  “I’d really never thought of that before.  I came to see you without knowing why.  But if I were to tell Augustine, how she’d laugh!”