with surprise.  She soon began to feel warm esteem for this man who seemed so clever, who, in speaking to the little one, showed himself as gentle as a woman, and manifested angelic patience in again and again repeating the same instructions.  She no longer considered him at all plain, but even felt somewhat jealous of beautiful Lisa.  And then she drew her chair still nearer, and gazed at Florent with an embarrassing smile.

“But you are jogging my elbow, mother, and I can’t write,” Muche exclaimed angrily.  “There! see what a blot you’ve made me make!  Get further away, do!”

La Normande now gradually began to say a good many unpleasant things about beautiful Lisa.  She pretended that the latter concealed her real age, that she laced her stays so tightly that she nearly suffocated herself, and that if she came down of a morning looking so trim and neat, without a single hair out of place, it must be because she looked perfectly hideous when in dishabille.  Then La Normande would raise her arm a little, and say that there was no need for her to wear any stays to cramp and deform her figure.  At these times the lessons would be interrupted, and Muche gazed with interest at his mother as she raised her arms.  Florent listened to her, and even laughed, thinking to himself that women were very odd creatures.  The rivalry between the beautiful Norman and beautiful Lisa amused him.

Muche, however, managed to finish his page of writing.  Florent, who was a good penman, set him copies in large hand and round hand on slips of paper.  The words he chose were very long and took up the whole line, and he evinced a marked partiality for such expressions as “tyrannically,” “liberticide,” “unconstitutional,” and “revolutionary.”  At times also he made the boy copy such sentences as these:  “The day of justice will surely come”; “The suffering of the just man is the condemnation of the oppressor”; “When the hour strikes, the guilty shall fall.”  In preparing these copy slips he was, indeed, influenced by the ideas which haunted his brain; he would for the time become quite oblivious of Muche, the beautiful Norman, and all his surroundings.  The lad would have copied Rousseau’s “Contrat Social” had he been told to do so; and thus, drawing each letter in turn, he filled page after page with lines of “tyrannically” and “unconstitutional.”

As long as the tutor remained there, old Madame Mehudin kept fidgeting round the table, muttering to herself.  She still harboured terrible rancour against Florent; and asserted that it was folly to make the lad work in that way at a time when children should be in bed.  She would certainly have turned that “spindle-shanks” out of the house, if the beautiful Norman, after a stormy scene, had not bluntly told her that she would go to live elsewhere if she were not allowed to receive whom she chose.  However, the pair began quarrelling again on the subject every evening.