And here his mother, like all women, went off into wordy lamentations. What could she do now that she was deprived of the gifts of produce which Moreau was able to send her while managing Presles? Oscar had overthrown his best friend.
Next to trade and office work, of which her son need not even think, came the legal profession as a notary, a pleader, an attorney, or an usher. But then he must study law for three years at least, and pay heavy fees for his admission, his examinations, his theses, and diploma; the number of competitors was so great, that superior talent was indispensable, and how was he to live? That was the constantly recurring question.
“Oscar,” she said in conclusion, “all my pride, all my life were centered in you. I could bear to look forward to an old age of poverty, for I kept my eyes on you; I saw you entering on a prosperous career, and succeeding in it. That hope has given me courage to endure the privations I have gone through during the last six years to keep you at school, for it has cost seven or eight hundred francs a year besides the half-scholarship. Now that my hopes are crushed, I dread to think of your future fate. I must not spend a sou of Monsieur Clapart’s salary on my own son.
“What do you propose to do. You are not a good enough mathematician to pass into a specialist college; and, besides, where could I find the three thousand francs a year for your training?—This is life, my dear child! Well, you are eighteen, and a strong lad—enlist as a soldier; it is the only way you can make a living.”
Oscar as yet knew nothing of life. Like all boys who have been brought up in ignorance of the poverty at home, he had no idea of the need to work for his living; the word “trade” conveyed no idea to his mind; and the words “Government office” did not mean much, for he knew nothing of the work. He listened with a look of submission, which he tried to make penitential, but his mother’s remonstrances were lost in air. However, at the idea of being a soldier, and on seeing the tears in his mother’s eyes, the boy too was ready to weep. As soon as Madame Clapart saw the drops on her boy’s cheeks, she was quite disarmed; and, like all mothers in a similar position, she fell back on the generalities which wind up this sort of attack, in which they suffer all their own sorrows and their children’s at the same time.
“Come, Oscar, promise me to be more cautious for the future, not to blurt out whatever comes uppermost, to moderate your absurd conceit—” and so on.
Oscar was ready to promise all his mother asked, and pressing him gently to her heart, Madame Clapart ended by embracing him to comfort him for the scolding he had had.
“Now,” said she, “you will listen to your mother and follow her advice, for a mother can give her son none but good advice.—We will go and see your uncle Cardot. He is our last hope. Cardot owed a great deal to your father, who, by allowing him to marry his sister, with what was then an immense marriage portion, enabled him to make a large fortune in silk. I fancy he would place you with Monsieur Camusot, his son-in-law and successor in the Rue des Bourdonnais.
“Still, your uncle Cardot has four children of his own. He made over his shop, the Cocon d’Or, to his eldest daughter, Madame Camusot. Though Cardot has millions, there are the four children, by two wives, and he hardly knows of our existence. Marianne, his second girl, married Monsieur Protez, of Protez and Chiffreville. He paid four hundred thousand francs to put his eldest son in business as a notary; and he has just invested for his second son Joseph as a partner in the business of Matifat, drug-importers. Thus your uncle Cardot may very well not choose to be troubled about you, whom he sees but four times a year. He has never been to call on me here; but he could come to see me when I was in Madame Mère’s household, to be allowed to supply silks to their Imperial Highnesses, and the Emperor, and the Grandees at Court.—And now the Camusots are Ultras! Camusot’s eldest son, by his first wife, married the daughter of a gentleman usher to the King! Well, when the world stoops it grows hunchbacked. And, after all, it is a good business; the Cocon d’Or has the custom of the Court under the Bourbons as it had under the Emperor.
“Tomorrow we will go to see your uncle Cardot, and I hope you will contrive to behave; for, as I tell you, in him is our last hope.”
Monsieur Jean Jérôme Séverin Cardot had lost his second wife six years since—Mademoiselle Husson, on whom, in the days of his glory, the contractor had bestowed a marriage portion of a hundred thousand francs in hard cash. Cardot, the head-clerk of the Cocon d’Or, one of the old-established Paris houses, had bought the business in 1793 when its owners were ruined by the maximum, and Mademoiselle Husson’s money to back him had enabled him to make an almost colossal fortune in ten years. To provide handsomely for his children, he had very ingeniously invested three hundred thousand francs in annuities for himself and his wife, which brought him in thirty thousand francs a year. The rest of his capital he divided into three portions of four hundred thousand francs for his younger children, and the shop was taken as representing that sum by Camusot when he married the eldest girl. Thus the old fellow, now nearly seventy, could dispose of his thirty thousand francs a year without damaging his children’s interests; they were all well married, and
