In accordance, then, with the request of
my friend Mr. Bull, I proceeded on a certain
evening in November last to the theatre
which bears the name of La Gaîté, and
placing myself in a stalle d'orchestre awaited
the rising of the curtain with some anxiety.

"Now," I said to myself, as the ominous
hammer of the prompter struck the three
blows, which announce that the performance
is about to begin—a sound, by the by, which
is ever received by the audience with a loud
hum of anticipated delight—"now for an
exposition of vice and immorality which will
shake my excellent principles to their centre,
and send me out of the theatre degraded in
my own eyes by what I have had the
misfortune to witness."

When the curtain fell that night upon the
last act of one of the most touching and
powerful dramas which I had ever seen, I
retired like a solitary juryman, in my own
custody, to a neighbouring café, and there—
while consuming a very pleasant but harmless
mixture called un grogs de vin—set
myself to consider my verdict, and to get my
answer ready for Mr. Albion Bull.

The play which I had just seen was called
Les Crochets du Père Martin; and it may
as well be mentioned at once that les crochets
are a pair of wooden hooks, or yokes, which,
passing over the shoulders, sustain upon the
back a kind of cradle, in which any burden
which has to be carried may be borne. They
are worn by all French porters.

Let me now see what I remember of this
play.

The passenger who, arriving some forty
years ago at the port of Havre, confided his
luggage to the crochets of the commissionaire
Martin, and, being safely lodged at the hotel,
dismissed him with a fee of ten sous, would
have been surprised if any one had told him
that five of those small coins would be put
aside towards the formation of a fund which
the unlearned porter was laying by in order
that he might give an education to the son,
whose advancement, though the child was
yet but a baby in his mother's arms, was the
whole and sole object of the man's ambition.
Yet it was so, and the privations which the
honest couple endured became at last a habit
and part of their nature. Little by little, by
heroic endurance, by long self-sacrifice, by
unwearying industry, enough is amassed for
the grand object, and the son, educated at
such a cost, is sent to Paris to complete those:
studies which it is needful he should pass
through in order to enter on the career of an
advocate, while the father, a man now of
some sixty years of age, is able to retire and
spend his declining years in a well-earned
repose.

Once, and once only, he goes to Paris to
pay a visit to his son. The lad is taken by
surprise, and is found surrounded by dissolute
companions. His idleness and extravagance
have rendered his father's self-denial
useless. His career is blasted at the
outset.

But the simple old porter is far from
perceiving all this, and it is a painful thing to
see how completely and how easily he is
taken in. The companions who are feasting
at the son's expense—nay, the very usurer
who has brought him a fresh supply of
money—all these are represented as clients
who have come to consult the young advocate,
and the father (whose presence seriously
interferes with the festivities of the day) is
ultimately got rid of by a story of a pretended
lecture on law which the son is bound to
attend as a part of his professional duties.

It would not be easy to imagine anything
more affecting than this first portion of the
play. The father so completely deceived.
The son already unhappy in anticipation of
a little-distant future, when all must come
out.

His credit gone as well as his money, the
wretched boy yields at length to the request
of his parents, who still live at Havre, that
he will tear himself away from his professional
avocations, and visit them for a day
or two at least. The father and mother
almost fight for possession of him on his
arrival; and, independently of the sufferings
which the lad undergoes from anxiety about
the future, it must be no small punishment
to him to hear the continual allusions which
are made to the severity of his studies and
the predictions of future greatness in her son
with which his poor old mother comforts
herself.

It is a blow which makes the spectator
wince as if he had been struck, when the
whole fabric of this worthy couple's
happiness is by one rude and terrible stroke
shivered to pieces in an instant. It is a
whole life's object gone in a moment. A
lifetime's hope withdrawn.

The usurer before spoken of, becoming
impatient for his money, makes a journey to
Havre, and, getting the Père Martin alone,
reveals to him, in a long and dreadful scene,
the true condition of his son's affairs—the
hideous amount of his debts—the accursed
history of his idleness, his dissipation, his
spendthrift folly.

I remember, then, all this—and what
besides? That the old porter, true to a life
of unselfishness, is, even in his first horror
and indignation, mindful of others, and
resolves that, though the ruin which has fallen
upon them cannot be hidden from his wife,
yet that her belief in the son whom she has
made an idol of shall be left to her—lest, if
the veil were torn aside, the truth should
kill her. So he takes upon himself the
blame, and revealing to her that they are
left without a penny in the world and that
the shelter of the house over their heads
must be theirs no longer, he yet attributes
this disaster to the failure of a speculation in
which he had embarked their little property,