Charlottes Inheritance | Page 3

to enjoy the delights of
that wondrous capital--and to return in a few years to set up for himself
as avocat at the town of Vevinord, some half-dozen leagues from the
patrimonial estate. He was created to plead for the innocent, to
denounce the guilty, to be grand and brave and fiery-hot with
enthusiasm in defence of virtuous peasants charged unjustly with the
stealing of sheep, or firing of corn-ricks. It never struck these simple
souls that he might sometimes be called upon to defend the guilty, or to
denounce the innocent.
It was all settled at last. Gustave was to go to Paris, and enter himself
as a student of law. There were plenty of boarding-houses in the
neighbourhood of the Ecole de Droit where a young man might find a
home; and to one of these Gustave was recommended by a friend of his
family. It was the Pension Magnotte to which they had sent him, the
big dreary house, entre cour et jardin, which had once been so grand
and noble. A printer now occupied the lower chambers, and a hand
painted on the wall pointed to the Pension Magnotte, au premier. Tirez
le cordon, s.v.p.
Gustave was twenty-one years of age when he came to Paris; tall,
stalwart, broad of shoulders and deep of chest, with a fair frank face, an
auburn moustache, candid, kind blue eyes--a physiognomy rather
Saxon than Celtic. He was a man who made friends quickly, and was
soon at home among the students, roaring their favourite songs, and
dancing their favourite dances at the dancing-places of that day, joining
with a pleasant heartiness in all their innocent dissipations. For guilty
dissipation the young provincial had no taste. Did he not carry the
images of two kind and pure women about with him wherever he went,
like two attendant angels ever protecting his steps; and could he leave
them sorrowing on thresholds they could not pass? Ah, no! He was
loud and boisterous and wild of spirits in those early days, but
incapable of meanness or vice.

"It is a brave heart," Madame Magnotte said of him, "though for the
breaking of glasses a scourge--un fléau."
The ladies of the Pension Magnotte were for the most part of mature
age and unattractive appearance--two or three lonely spinsters, eking
out their pitiful little incomes as best they might, by the surreptitious
sale of delicate embroideries, confectioned in their dismal leisure; and a
fat elderly widow, popularly supposed to be enormously rich, but of
miserly propensities. "It is the widow of Harpagon himself," Madame
Magnotte told her gossips--an old woman with two furiously ugly
daughters, who for the last fifteen years had lived a nomadic life in
divers boarding-houses, fondly clinging to the hope that, amongst so
many strange bachelors, husbands for these two solitary ones must at
last be found.
These, with a pale young lady who gave music lessons in the quarter,
were all the feminine inmates of the mansion; and amongst these
Gustave Lenoble was chief favourite. His tender courtesy for these
lonely women seemed in some manner an evidence of that good old
blood whereof the young man's father boasted. Francis the First, who
listened with bent knee and bare head to his mother's discourse, was not
more reverential to that noble Savoyarde than was Gustave to the
shabby-genteel maiden ladies of the Pension Magnotte. In truth, this
young man had a heart pitiful and tender as the heart of woman. To be
unfortunate was to possess a sure claim upon his pity and regard; to be
poor and friendless was the best appeal to his kindness. He spent his
evenings sometimes in the great dreary desert of a salon, and listened
respectfully while Mademoiselle Servin, the young music-teacher,
played dismal sonatas of Gluck or Grétry on a cracked old piano that
had been one of the earliest made of those instruments, and was now
attenuated and feeble as the very ghost of music. He listened to
Madame Magnotte's stories of departed splendour. To him she opened
her heart as she never had opened it to those other young men.
"They mock themselves of everything--even the religion!" she
exclaimed, with horror. "They are Diderots and Holbachs in the bud,
less the talent. But you do not come of that gutter in which they were

born. You are of the old blood of France, M. Lenoble, and I can trust
myself to you as I cannot to them. I, who speak to you--I, too, come of
a good old race, and there is sympathy between we others."
And then, after babbling to him of her lost station, the lady would
entertain him with some dainty little supper with which she was wont
to indulge herself and her lady boarders, when the students--who were