unfortunately, your wife. But as for me, it is another thing. I shall
be of age in a few months; and you have no rights over me even as a

minor. I have never asked anything of you. Thanks to Monsieur Moreau,
I have never cost you one penny, and I owe you no gratitude.

Therefore, I say, let me alone!"
Clapart, hearing this apostrophe, slunk back to his sofa in the

chimney corner. The reasoning and the inward fury of the young man,
who had just received a lecture from his friend Godeschal, silenced

the imbecile mind of the sick man.
"A momentarytemptation, such as you yourself would have yielded to at

my age," said Oscar to Moreau, "has made me commit a fault which
Desroches thinks serious, though it is only a peccadillo. I am more

provoked with myself for taking Florentine of the Gaiete for a
marquise than I am for losing fifteen hundred francs after a little

debauch in which everybody, even Godeschal, was half-seas over. This
time, at any rate, I've hurt no one by myself. I'm cured of such

things forever. If you are willing to help me, Monsieur Moreau, I
swear to you that the six years I must still stay a clerk before I can

get a practice shall be spent without--"
"Stop there!" said Moreau. "I have three children, and I can make no

promises."
"Never mind, never mind," said Madame Clapart to her son, casting a

reproachful glance at Moreau. "Your uncle Cardot--"
"I have no longer an uncle Cardot," replied Oscar, who related the

scene at the rue de Vendome.
Madame Clapart, feeling her legs give way under the weight of her

body, staggered to a chair in the dining-room, where she fell as if
struck by lightning.

"All the miseries together!" she said, as she fainted.
Moreau took the poor mother in his arms, and carried her to the bed in

her chamber. Oscar remained motionless, as if crushed.
"There is nothing left for you," said Moreau, coming back to him, "but

to make yourself a soldier. That idiot of a Clapart looks to me as
though he couldn't live three months, and then your mother will be

without a penny. Ought I not, therefore, to reserve for her the little
money I am able to give? It was impossible to tell you this before

her. As a soldier, you'll eat plain bread and reflect on life such as
it is to those who are born into it without fortune."

"I may get a lucky number," said Oscar.
"Suppose you do, what then? Your mother has well fulfilled her duty

towards you. She gave you an education; she placed you on the right
road, and secured you a career. You have left it. Now, what can you

do? Without money, nothing; as you know by this time. You are not a
man who can begin a new career by taking off your coat and going to

work in your shirt-sleeves with the tools of an artisan. Besides, your
mother loves you, and she would die to see you come to that."

Oscar sat down and no longer restrained his tears, which flowed
copiously. At last he understood this language, so completely

unintelligible to him ever since his first fault.
"Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting

the profundity of that cruel sentence.
"My fate will soon be decided," said Oscar. "I draw my number the day

after to-morrow. Between now and then I will decide upon my future."
Moreau, deeply distressed in spite of his stern bearing, left the

household in the rue de la Cerisaie to its despair.
Three days later Oscar drew the number twenty-seven. In the interests

of the poor lad the former steward of Presles had the courage to go to
the Comte de Serizy and ask for his influence to get Oscar into the

cavalry. It happened that the count's son, having left the Ecole
Polytechnique rather low in his class, was appointed, as a favor, sub-

lieutenant in a regiment of cavalry commanded by the Duc de
Maufrigneuse. Oscar had, therefore, in his great misfortune, the small

luck of being, at the Comte de Serizy's instigation, drafted into that
noble regiment, with the promise of promotion to quartermaster within

a year. Chance had thus placed the ex-clerk under the command of the
son of the Comte de Serizy.

Madame Clapart, after languishing for some days, so keenly was she
affected by these catastrophes, became a victim to the remorse which

seizes upon many a mother whose conduct has been frail in her youth,
and who, in her old age, turns to repentance. She now considered

herself under a curse. She attributed the sorrows of her second
marriage and the misfortunes of her son to a just retribution by which

God was compelling her to expiate the errors and pleasures of her
youth. This opinion soon became a certainty in her mind. The poor

woman went, for the first time in forty years, to confess herself to
the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's, who led her into the practice

of devotion. But so ill-used and loving a soul as that of Madame
Clapart's could never be anything but simply pious. The Aspasia of the

Directory wanted to expiate her sins in order to draw down the
blessing of God on the head of her poor Oscar, and she henceforth

vowed herself to works and deeds of the purest piety. She believed she
had won the attention of heaven when she saved the life of Monsieur

Clapart, who, thanks to her devotion, lived on to torture her; but she
chose to see, in the tyranny of that imbecile mind, a trial inflicted

by the hand of one who loveth while he chasteneth.
Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of

the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-
lieutenant of the line. Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five

years old. As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was
always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles

around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and
tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never

become an officer as matters then were. At that time the cavalry
grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families,

and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult.
Oscar's sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-

lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line. In the month of
February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son

through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe
Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls.

Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in
the depths of his heart he was a liberal. Therefore, in the struggle

of 1830, he went over to the side of the people. This desertion, which
had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought

him before the eyes of the public. During the excitement of triumph in
the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of

the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette,
who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best

of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National
guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to

fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the
time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The

Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this
regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be

abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a
dead horse. Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron:

"Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel."
He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him.

The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-
for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across

his horse, and carried off at full gallop,--receiving, as he did so,
two slashes from yataghans on his left arm.

Oscar's conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer's cross
of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of

lieutenant-colonel. He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte
de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the

regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his
wounds.

The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had
shown him such devotion. Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that

the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought
best to amputate his left arm.

Thus the Comte de Serizy was led not only to forgive Oscar for his
painful remarks on the journey to Presles, but to feel himself his