The Bachelors Read Online Free PDF

remained a bachelor. Meanwhile the Coantrés, still flanked by M. Élie who had also clung to his celibacy, had acquired a son and a daughter, Léon and Marie.
    By 1890, nothing had changed in the Octave-Émilie partnership, but M. Octave was now head of something or other at the bank and was growing pompous. The Coantrés had had another daughter, Madeleine; Marie had died at the age of sixteen. Marriage had brought about one unfortunate transformation in M. de Coantré. His main occupation hitherto had been debauchery. A dutiful husband, he gave this up on marrying. But he had to keep himself occupied; his passionate interest in women had to be diverted into some other channel. So he busied himself by trying to increase his fortune on the stock exchange — in other words, in the time-honoured fashion of his kind, by ruining himself. By 1890, he was well on the way to bankruptcy.—
    That year, Léon de Coantré went to do his military service at Toulouse. He had been a pampered child, who was made to keep his long curls until the age of seven, and then a brilliant pupil of the Jesuits, brilliant but temperamental and undisciplined. His mother spoiled him madly, from a mixture of love and weakness. His father spoiled him from inclination — the Coantrés were an easy-going race — and on principle. The fact was that M. de Coantré did not find it easy to stomach the presence in his home of such a disagreeable person as Élie de Coëtquidan, more and more unmarriageable; he had rather an aversion for the Coëtquidans. In spoiling his son he was protesting against the harsh theories of his father-in-law; too strict an upbringing, he claimed, automatically produces a reaction when the child grows up. What had become of old Coëtquidan's children? Angèle and Émilie had kept in marriage the same cowed demeanour as under their father's régime, and their social life had suffered from it. Élie simply did what he liked, and moreover (as we shall see) had turned out to be a non-starter.
    Having passed his baccalauréat, Léon de Coantré started reading law. At his first year's examination, one of the examiners thought he remembered having met some de Coantrés as a young man. Without explaining to Léon the reason for his curiosity, he asked him a few questions about his family. Léon's reaction was worthy of the elder Coëtquidan. 'What's it to do with you?' he asked the august personage. He was promptly ploughed. The two years that followed until his military service, still reading law without either inclination or success, were as characteristically futile as the student years of most average Frenchmen.
    He was a gifted youth, in a variety of ways. He excelled at writing Latin verse. He drew and painted agreeably, without ever having been taught. He could draw expressive harmonies from the piano, although his ignorance of music was such that he could scarcely identify a single note on the keyboard. He was interested in physics and mechanics and would shut himself up to carry out experiments. He was astonishingly clever with his hands, and could produce models of houses or boats, executed in such elaborate detail, with such taste, skill and technical ingenuity as to make them little works of art, good enough to be shown in an exhibition.
    In the army, where he became a sergeant, he made friends with a fellow-sergeant called Levier, whose father was foreman in, an engineering workshop. His horror of social constraints of any kind induced in him a fellow-feeling for the people, made him choose working-class youths as friends, sewing-girls and maidservants as mistresses: with them he did not have to stand on ceremony. Society people were his bugbears: he was physically incapable of conceiving a desire for a wellborn woman. Towards the end of his military service, Léon told Levier of a certain apparatus he had in mind for enlarging photographs, something much more advanced than the existing method. Levier was enthusiastic. In a