frightful without them; which is frequently the case with near-sighted
persons; for the habit of looking through glasses has covered the
pupils of his eyes with a sort of film.

Between the ages of eighteen and thirty, young Thuillier had much
success among women, in a sphere which began with the lesser bourgeois
and ended in that of the heads of departments. Under the Empire, war
left Parisian society rather denuded of men of energy, who were mostly
on the battlefield; and perhaps, as a great physician has suggested,
this may account for the flabbiness of the generation which occupies
the middle of the nineteenth century.

Thuillier, forced to make himself noticeable by other charms than
those of mind, learned to dance and to waltz in a way to be cited; he
was called "that handsome Thuillier"; he played billiards to
perfection; he knew how to cut out likenesses in black paper, and his
friend Colleville coached him so well that he was able to sing all the
ballads of the day. These various small accomplishments resulted in
that appearance of success which deceives youth and befogs it about
the future. Mademoiselle Thuillier, from 1806 to 1814, believed in her
brother as Mademoiselle d'Orleans believed in Louis-Philippe. She was
proud of Jerome; she expected to see him the director-general of his
department of the ministry, thanks to his successes in certain salons,
where, undoubtedly, he would never have been admitted but for the
circumstances which made society under the Empire a medley.

But the successes of "that handsome Thuillier" were usually of short
duration; women did not care to keep his devotion any more than he
desired to make his devotion eternal. He was really an unwilling Don
Juan; the career of a "beau" wearied him to the point of aging him;