If you think that frustrated passion was the cause of Patignon’s downfall, I fear you are mistaken. In my own mind there is no doubt that he had a young man’s clean and honest love for Rosalie. Indeed, it is the only good thing I’ve heard about him. But he was a man in whose heart clean and honest love was easily fouled by baser appetites, and obscured by unregulated ambitions. He was not well parented. This we must remember. His father, the cook, for some criminal offence, had no longer civil rights in France; once he landed on French soil he would have been clapped into jail. His mother was a drunken Irish-woman. He had owed his start in life to a benevolent American who, having by chance discovered the boy’s talent, had financed his education and by a chance, this time unhappy, had died
