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But when I was twelve years old, after my first communion, there was nothing but poverty. The managers put me as apprentice with a chair mender in Faubourg Saint-Jacques. That is not a trade, you know, it is impossible to earn one's living at it, and as proof of it, the greater part of the time the master was only able to engage the poor little blind boys from the Blind Asylum.
Mignon let the gossip go its rounds for several months without giving it any fresh food, but at length, when the time was ripe, he called on the priest of Saint-Jacques at Chinon, and told him that matters had now come to such a pass in the Ursuline convent that he felt it impossible to bear up alone under the responsibility of caring for the salvation of the afflicted nuns, and he begged him to accompany him to the convent.
"Make way! here's Monsieur Barre, the Cure of Saint-Jacques at Chinon." "A saint!" murmured one bystander. "A hypocrite!" exclaimed a manly voice. "See how thin he is with fasting!" "See how pale he is with remorse!" "He's the man to drive away devils!" "Yes, but not till he's done with them for his own purposes." The dialogue was interrupted by the general exclamation, "How beautiful she is!"
Now the nurse took the two children to the square of the Tour Saint-Jacques when the weather was pleasant, and in the evening at the family table there were two high-chairs side by side for the boy and his foster sister. In addition to which, the Bayards were not slow to perceive the good influence which Norine had upon Leon.
The Church of Saint-Augustin, the Opera House, the Tower of Saint-Jacques, looked like mountains clad with eternal snow. Nearer at hand the pavilions of the Tuileries and the Louvre, joined together by newly erected buildings, resembled a ridge of hills with spotless summits.
A few paces more, and you arrive at the abominable pollarded elms of the Barriere Saint-Jacques, that expedient of the philanthropist to conceal the scaffold, that miserable and shameful Place de Grove of a shop-keeping and bourgeois society, which recoiled before the death penalty, neither daring to abolish it with grandeur, nor to uphold it with authority.
Those who have not been there would scarcely believe that the town possesses a castle perched upon towering cliffs, or that its splendid old church of Saint-Jacques is the real glory of the place.
"Father, you have heard speak of a certain Bonapartist club in the Rue Saint-Jacques?" "No. 53; yes, I am vice-president." "Father, your coolness makes me shudder." "Why, my dear boy, when a man has been proscribed by the mountaineers, has escaped from Paris in a hay-cart, been hunted over the plains of Bordeaux by Robespierre's bloodhounds, he becomes accustomed to most things.
Those are days when the whole world shines radiant with light, when everything glows and sparkles before the eyes of youth, days that bring joyous energy that is never brought into harness, days of debts and of painful fears that go hand in hand with every delight. Those who do not know the left bank of the Seine between the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Rue des Saints-Peres know nothing of life.
At that moment, he had three francs left. His aunt did not inform his grandfather of this refusal for fear of exasperating him. Besides, had he not said: "Let me never hear the name of that blood-drinker again!" Marius left the hotel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, as he did not wish to run in debt there. Life became hard for Marius. It was nothing to eat his clothes and his watch.
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