II

A glance rapidly thrown over the past life of this household will

strengthen the ideas which ought to have been suggested by the

friendly altercation of the two personages in this scene. While

picturing the manners and customs of retail shopkeepers, this sketch

will also show by what singular chances Cesar Birotteau became deputy-

mayor and perfumer, retired officer of the National Guard, and

chevalier of the Legion of honor. In bringing to light the depths of

his character and the causes of his rise, we shall show that

fortuitous commercial events which strong brains dominate, may become

irreparable catastrophes for weak ones. Events are never absolute;

their results depend on individuals. Misfortune is a stepping-stone

for genius, the baptismal font of Christians, a treasure for the

skilful man, an abyss for the feeble.

A vine-dresser in the neighborhood of Chinon, named Jean Birotteau,

married the waiting-maid of a lady whose vines he tilled. He had three

sons; his wife died in giving birth to the last, and the poor man did

not long survive her. The mistress had been fond of the maid, and

brought up with her own sons the eldest child, Francois, and placed

him in a seminary. Ordained priest, Francois Birotteau hid himself

during the Revolution, and led the wandering life of priests not sworn

by the Republic, hunted like wild beasts and guillotined at the first

chance. At the time when this history begins he was vicar of the

cathedral of Tours, and had only once left that city to visit his

brother Cesar. The bustle of Paris so bewildered the good priest that

he was afraid to leave his room. He called the cabriolets "half-

coaches," and wondered at all he saw. After a week's stay he went back

to Tours resolving never to revisit the capital.

The second son of the vine-dresser, Jean Birotteau, was drafted into

the militia, and won the rank of captain early in the wars of the

Revolution. At the battle of Trebia, Macdonald called for volunteers

to carry a battery. Captain Jean Birotteau advanced with his company,

and was killed. The destiny of the Birotteaus demanded, no doubt, that

they should be oppressed by men, or by circumstances, wheresoever they

planted themselves.

The last child is the hero of this story. When Cesar at fourteen years

of age could read, write, and cipher, he left his native place and

came to Paris on foot to seek his fortune, with one louis in his

pocket. The recommendation of an apothecary at Tours got him a place

as shop-boy with Monsieur and Madame Ragon, perfumers. Cesar owned at

this period a pair of hob-nailed shoes, a pair of breeches, blue

stockings, a flowered waistcoat, a peasant's jacket, three coarse

shirts of good linen, and his travelling cudgel. If his hair was cut

like that of a choir-boy, he at least had the sturdy loins of a

Tourangian; if he yielded sometimes to the native idleness of his

birthplace, it was counterbalanced by his desire to make his fortune;

if he lacked cleverness and education, he possessed an instinctive

rectitude and delicate feelings, which he inherited from his mother,--

a being who had, in Tourangian phrase, a "heart of gold." Cesar

received from the Ragons his food, six francs a month as wages, and a

pallet to sleep upon in the garret near the cook. The clerks who

taught him to pack the goods, to do the errands, and sweep up the shop

and the pavement, made fun of him as they did so, according to the

manners and customs of shop-keeping, in which chaff is a principal

element of instruction. Monsieur and Madame Ragon spoke to him like a

dog. No one paid attention to his weariness, though many a night his

feet, blistered by the pavements of Paris, and his bruised shoulders,

made him suffer horribly. This harsh application of the maxim "each

for himself,"--the gospel of large cities,--made Cesar think the life

of Paris very hard. At night he cried as he thought of Touraine, where

the peasant works at his ease, where the mason lays a stone between

breakfast and dinner, and idleness is wisely mingled with labor; but

he always fell asleep without having time to think of running away,

for he had his errands to do in the morning, and obeyed his duty with

the instinct of a watch-dog. If occasionally he complained, the head

clerk would smile with a jovial air, and say,--

"Ah, my boy! all is not rose at 'The Queen of Roses.' Larks don't fall

down roasted; you must run after them and catch them, and then you

must find some way to cook them."

The cook, a big creature from Picardy, took the best bits for herself,

and only spoke to Cesar when she wanted to complain of Monsieur and

Madame Ragon, who left her nothing to steal. Towards the end of the

first month this girl, who was forced to keep house of a Sunday,

opened a conversation with Cesar. Ursula with the grease washed off

seemed charming to the poor shop-boy, who, unless hindered by chance,

was likely to strike on the first rock that lay hidden in his way.

Like all unprotected boys, he loved the first woman who threw him a

kind look. The cook took Cesar under her protection; and thence

followed certain secret relations, which the clerks laughed at

pitilessly. Two years later, the cook happily abandoned Cesar for a

young recruit belonging to her native place who was then hiding in

Paris,--a lad twenty years old, owning a few acres of land, who let

Ursula marry him.

During those two years the cook had fed her little Cesar well, and had

explained to him certain mysteries of Parisian life, which she made

him look at from the bottom; and she impressed upon him, out of

jealousy, a profound horror of evil places, whose dangers seemed not

unknown to her. In 1792 the feet of the deserted Cesar were well-

toughened to the pavements, his shoulders to the bales, and his mind

to what he called the "humbugs" of Paris. So when Ursula abandoned him

he was speedily consoled, for she had realized none of his instinctive

ideas in relation to sentiment. Licentious and surly, wheedling and

pilfering, selfish and a tippler, she clashed with the simple nature

of Birotteau without offering him any compensating perspective.

Sometimes the poor lad felt with pain that he was bound by ties that

are strong enough to hold ingenuous hearts to a creature with whom he

could not sympathize. By the time that he became master of his own

heart he had reached his growth, and was sixteen years old. His mind,

developed by Ursula and by the banter of the clerks, made him study

commerce with an eye in which intelligence was veiled beneath

simplicity: he observed the customers; asked in leisure moments for

explanations about the merchandise, whose divers sorts and proper

places he retained in his head. The day came when he knew all the

articles, and their prices and marks, better than any new-comer; and

from that time Monsieur and Madame Ragon made a practice of employing

him in the business.

When the terrible levy of the year II. made a clean sweep in the shop

of citizen Ragon, Cesar Birotteau, promoted to be second clerk,

profited by the occasion to obtain a salary of fifty francs a month,

and took his seat at the dinner-table of the Ragons with ineffable

delight. The second clerk of "The Queen of Roses," possessing already

six hundred francs, now had a chamber where he could put away, in

long-coveted articles of furniture, the clothing he had little by

little got together. Dressed like other young men of an epoch when

fashion required the assumption of boorish manners, the gentle and

modest peasant had an air and manner which rendered him at least their

equal; and he thus passed the barriers which in other times ordinary

life would have placed between himself and the bourgeoisie. Towards

the end of this year his integrity won him a place in the counting-

room. The dignified citoyenne Ragon herself looked after his linen,

and the two shopkeepers became familiar with him.

In Vendemiaire, 1794, Cesar, who possessed a hundred louis d'or,

changed them for six thousand francs in assignats, with which he

bought into the Funds at thirty, paying for the investment on the very

day before the paper began its course of depreciation at the Bourse,

and locking up his securities with unspeakable satisfaction. From that

day forward he watched the movement of stocks and public affairs with

secret anxieties of his own, which made him quiver at each rumor of

the reverses or successes that marked this period of our history.

Monsieur Ragon, formerly perfumer to her majesty Queen Marie-

Antoinette, confided to Cesar Birotteau, during this critical period,

his attachment to the fallen tyrants. This disclosure was one of the

cardinal events in Cesar's life. The nightly conversations when the

shop was closed, the street quiet, the accounts regulated, made a

fanatic of the Tourangian, who in becoming a royalist obeyed an inborn

instinct. The recital of the virtuous deeds of Louis XVI., the

anecdotes with which husband and wife exalted the memory of the queen,

fired the imagination of the young man. The horrible fate of those two

crowned heads, decapitated a few steps from the shop-door, roused his

feeling heart and made him hate a system of government which was

capable of shedding blood without repugnance. His commercial interests

showed him the death of trade in the Maximum, and in political

convulsions, which are always destructive of business. Moreover, like

a true perfumer, he hated the revolution which made a Titus of every

man and abolished powder. The tranquillity resulting from absolutism

could alone, he thought, give life to money, and he grew bigoted on

behalf of royalty. When Monsieur Ragon saw that Cesar was well-

disposed on this point, he made him head-clerk and initiated him into

the secrets of "The Queen of Roses," several of whose customers were

the most active and devoted emissaries of the Bourbons, and where the

correspondence between Paris and the West secretly went on. Carried

away by the fervor of youth, electrified by his intercourse with the

Georges, the Billardiere, Montauran, Bauvan, Longuy, Manda, Bernier,

du Guenic, and the Fontaines, Cesar flung himself into the conspiracy

by which the royalists and the terrorists combined on the 13th

Vendemiaire against the expiring Convention.

On that day Cesar had the honor of fighting against Napoleon on the

steps of Saint-Roch, and was wounded at the beginning of the affair.

Every one knows the result of that attempt. If the aide-de-camp of

Barras then issued from his obscurity, the obscurity of Birotteau

saved the clerk's life. A few friends carried the belligerent perfumer

to "The Queen of Roses," where he remained hidden in the garret,

nursed by Madame Ragon, and happily forgotten. Cesar Birotteau never

had but that one spurt of martial courage. During the month his

convalescence lasted, he made solid reflections on the absurdity of an

alliance between politics and perfumery. Although he remained

royalist, he resolved to be, purely and simply, a royalist perfumer,

and never more to compromise himself, body and soul, for his country.

On the 18th Brumaire, Monsieur and Madame Ragon, despairing of the

royal cause, determined to give up perfumery, and live like honest

bourgeois without meddling in politics. To recover the value of their

business, it was necessary to find a man who had more integrity than

ambition, more plain good sense than ability. Ragon proposed the

affair to his head-clerk. Birotteau, now master at twenty years of age

of a thousand francs a year from the public Funds, hesitated. His

ambition was to live near Chinon as soon as he could get together an

income of fifteen hundred francs, or whenever the First Consul should

have consolidated the public debt by consolidating himself in the

Tuileries. Why should he risk his honest and simple independence in

commercial uncertainties? he asked himself. He had never expected to

win so large a fortune, and he owed it to happy chances which only

come in early youth; he intended to marry in Touraine some woman rich

enough to enable him to buy and cultivate Les Tresorieres, a little

property which, from the dawn of his reason, he had coveted, which he

dreamed of augmenting, where he could make a thousand crowns a year,

and where he would lead a life of happy obscurity. He was about to

refuse the offer, when love suddenly changed all his resolutions by

increasing tenfold the measure of his ambition.

After Ursula's desertion, Cesar had remained virtuous, as much through

fear of the dangers of Paris as from application to his work. When the

passions are without food they change their wants; marriage then

becomes, to persons of the middle class, a fixed idea, for it is their

only way of winning and appropriating a woman. Cesar Birotteau had

reached that point. Everything at "The Queen of Roses" now rested on

the head-clerk; he had not a moment to give to pleasure. In such a

life wants become imperious, and a chance meeting with a beautiful

young woman, of whom a libertine clerk would scarcely have dreamed,

produced on Cesar an overpowering effect. On a fine June day, crossing

by the Pont-Marie to the Ile Saint-Louis, he saw a young girl standing

at the door of a shop at the angle of the Quai d'Anjou. Constance

Pillerault was the forewoman of a linen-draper's establishment called

Le Petit Matelot,--the first of those shops which have since been

established in Paris with more or less of painted signs, floating

banners, show-cases filled with swinging shawls, cravats arranged like

houses of cards, and a thousand other commercial seductions, such as

fixed prices, fillets of suspended objects, placards, illusions and

optical effects carried to such a degree of perfection that a shop-

front has now become a commercial poem. The low price of all the

articles called "Novelties" which were to be found at the Petit-

Matelot gave the shop an unheard of vogue, and that in a part of Paris

which was the least favorable to fashion and commerce. The young

forewoman was at this time cited for her beauty, as was the case in

later days with the beautiful lemonade-girl of the cafe of the Milles

Colonnnes, and several other poor creatures who flattened more noses,

young and old, against the window-panes of milliners, confectioners,

and linen-drapers, than there are stones in the streets of Paris.

The head-clerk of "The Queen of Roses," living between Saint-Roch and

the Rue de la Sourdiere, knew nothing of the existence of the Petit-

Matelot; for the smaller trades of Paris are more or less strangers to

each other. Cesar was so vigorously smitten by the beauty of Constance

that he rushed furiously into the shop to buy six linen shirts,

disputing the price a long time, and requiring volumes of linen to be

unfolded and shown to him, precisely like an Englishwoman in the humor

for "shopping." The young person deigned to take notice of Cesar,

perceiving, by certain symptoms known to women, that he came more for

the seller than the goods. He dictated his name and address to the

young lady, who grew very indifferent to the admiration of her

customer once the purchase was made. The poor clerk had had little to

do to win the good graces of Ursula; in such matters he was as silly

as a sheep, and love now made him sillier. He dared not utter a word,

and was moreover too dazzled to observe the indifference which

succeeded the smiles of the siren shopwoman.

For eight succeeding days Cesar mounted guard every evening before the

Petit-Matelot, watching for a look as a dog waits for a bone at the

kitchen door, indifferent to the derision of the clerks and the shop-

girls, humbly stepping aside for the buyers and passers-by, and

absorbed in the little revolving world of the shop. Some days later he

again entered the paradise of his angel, less to purchase

handkerchiefs than to communicate to her a luminous idea.

"If you should have need of perfumery, Mademoiselle, I could furnish

you in the same manner," he said as he paid for the handkerchiefs.

Constance Pillerault was daily receiving brilliant proposals, in which

there was no question of marriage; and though her heart was as pure as

her forehead was white, it was only after six months of marches and

counter-marches, in the course of which Cesar revealed his

inextinguishable love, that she condescended to receive his

attentions, and even then without committing herself to an answer,--a

prudence suggested by the number of her swains, wholesale wine-

merchants, rich proprietors of cafes, and others who made soft eyes at

her. The lover was backed up in his suit by the guardian of Constance,

Monsieur Claude-Joseph Pillerault, at that time an ironmonger on the

Quai de la Ferraille, whom the young man had finally discovered by

devoting himself to the subterraneous spying which distinguishes a

genuine love.

The rapidity of this narrative compels us to pass over in silence the

joys of Parisian love tasted with innocence, the prodigalities

peculiar to clerkdom, such as melons in their earliest prime, choice

dinners at Venua's followed by the theatre, Sunday jaunts to the

country in hackney-coaches. Without being handsome, there was nothing

in Cesar's person which made it difficult to love him. The life of

Paris and his sojourn in a dark shop had dulled the brightness of his

peasant complexion. His abundant black hair, his solid neck and

shoulders like those of a Norman horse, his sturdy limbs, his honest

and straightforward manner, all contributed to predispose others in

his favor. The uncle Pillerault, whose duty it was to watch over the

happiness of his brother's daughter, made inquiries which resulted in

his sanctioning the wishes of the young Tourangian. In the year 1800,

and in the pretty month of May, Mademoiselle Pillerault consented to

marry Cesar Birotteau, who fainted with joy at the moment when, under

a linden at Sceaux, Constance-Barbe-Josephine Pillerault accepted him

as her husband.

"My little girl," said Monsieur Pillerault, "you have won a good

husband. He has a warm heart and honorable feelings; he is true as

gold, and as good as an infant Jesus,--in fact, a king of men."

Constance frankly abdicated the more brilliant destiny to which, like

all shop-girls, she may at times have aspired. She wished to be an

honest woman, a good mother of a family, and looked at life according

to the religious programme of the middle classes. Such a career suited

her own ideas far better than the dangerous vanities which seduce so

many youthful Parisian imaginations. Constance, with her narrow

intelligence, was a type of the petty bourgeoisie whose labors are not

performed without grumbling; who begin by refusing what they desire,

and end by getting angry when taken at their word; whose restless

activity is carried into the kitchen and into the counting-room, into

the gravest matters of business, and into the invisible darns of the

household linen; who love while scolding, who conceive no ideas but

the simplest (the small change of the mind); who argue about

everything, fear everything, calculate everything, and fret

perpetually over the future. Her cold but ingenuous beauty, her

touching expression, her freshness and purity, prevented Birotteau

from thinking of her defects, which moreover were more than

compensated by a delicate sense of honor natural to women, by an

excessive love of order, by a fanaticism for work, and by her genius

as a saleswoman. Constance was eighteen years old, and possessed

eleven thousand francs of her own. Cesar, inspired by his love with an

excessive ambition, bought the business of "The Queen of Roses" and

removed it to a handsome building near the Place Vendome. At the early

age of twenty-one, married to a woman he adored, the proprietor of an

establishment for which he had paid three quarters of the price down,

he had the right to view, and did view, the future in glowing colors;

all the more when he measured the path which led from his original

point of departure. Roguin, notary of Ragon, who had drawn up the

marriage contract, gave the new perfumer some sound advice, and

prevented him from paying the whole purchase money down with the

fortune of his wife.

"Keep the means of undertaking some good enterprise, my lad," he had

said to him.

Birotteau looked up to the notary with admiration, fell into the habit

of consulting him, and made him his friend. Like Ragon and Pillerault,

he had so much faith in the profession that he gave himself up to

Roguin without allowing himself a suspicion. Thanks to this advice,

Cesar, supplied with the eleven thousand francs of his wife for his

start in business, would have scorned to exchange his possessions for

those of the First Consul, brilliant as the prospects of Napoleon

might seem. At first the Birotteaus kept only a cook, and lived in the

/entresol/ above the shop,--a sort of den tolerably well decorated by

an upholsterer, where the bride and bridegroom began a honeymoon that

was never to end. Madame Cesar appeared to advantage behind the

counter. Her celebrated beauty had an enormous influence upon the

sales, and the beautiful Madame Birotteau became a topic among the

fashionable young men of the Empire. If Cesar was sometimes accused of

royalism, the world did justice to his honesty; if a few neighboring

shopkeepers envied his happiness, every one at least thought him

worthy of it. The bullet which struck him on the steps of Saint-Roch

gave him the reputation of being mixed up with political secrets, and

also of being a courageous man,--though he had no military courage in

his heart, and not the smallest political idea in his brain. Upon

these grounds the worthy people of the arrondissement made him captain

of the National Guard; but he was cashiered by Napoleon, who,

according to Birotteau, owed him a grudge for their encounter on the

13th Vendemiaire. Cesar thus obtained at a cheap rate a varnish of

persecution, which made him interesting in the eyes of the opposition,

and gave him a certain importance.

*****

Such was the history of this household, lastingly happy through its

feeling, and agitated only by commercial anxieties.

During the first year Cesar instructed his wife about the sales of

their merchandise and the details of perfumery,--a business which she

understood admirably. She really seemed to have been created and sent

into the world to fit on the gloves of customers. At the close of that

year the assets staggered our ambitious perfumer; all costs

calculated, he would be able in less than twenty years to make a

modest capital of one hundred thousand francs, which was the sum at

which he estimated their happiness. He then resolved to reach fortune

more rapidly, and determined to manufacture articles as well as retail

them. Contrary to the advice of his wife, he hired some sheds, with

the ground about them, in the Faubourg du Temple, and painted upon

them in big letters, "Manufactory of Cesar Birotteau." He enticed a

skilful workman from Grasse, with whom he began, on equal shares, the

manufacture of soaps, essences, and eau-de-cologne. His connection

with this man lasted only six months, and ended by losses which fell

upon him alone. Without allowing himself to be discouraged, Birotteau

determined to get better results at any price, solely to avoid being

scolded by his wife,--to whom he acknowledged later that in those

depressing days his head had boiled like a saucepan, and that several

times, if it had not been for his religious sentiments, he should have

flung himself into the Seine.

Harassed by some unprofitable enterprise, he was lounging one day

along the boulevard on his way to dinner,--for the Parisian lounger is

as often a man filled with despair as an idler,--when among a parcel

of books for six sous a-piece, laid out in a hamper on the pavement,

his eyes lighted on the following title, yellow with dust: "Abdeker,

or the Art of Preserving Beauty." He picked up the so-called Arab

book, a sort of romance written by a physician of the preceding

century, and happened on a page which related to perfumes. Leaning

against a tree on the boulevard to turn over the leaves at his ease,

he read a note by the author which explained the nature of the skin

and the cuticle, and showed that a certain soap, or a certain paste,

often produced effects quite contrary to those expected of them, if

the soap and the paste toned up a skin which needed relaxing, or

relaxed a skin which required tones. Birotteau bought the book, in

which he saw his fortune. Nevertheless, having little confidence in

his own lights, he consulted a celebrated chemist, Vauquelin, from

whom he naively inquired how to mix a two-sided cosmetic which should

produce effects appropriate to the diversified nature of the human

epidermis. Truly scientific men--men who are really great in the sense

that they never attain in their lifetime the renown which their

immense and unrecognized labors deserve--are nearly always kind, and

willing to serve the poor in spirit. Vauquelin accordingly patronized

the perfumer, and allowed him to call himself the inventor of a paste

to whiten the hands, the composition of which he dictated to him.

Birotteau named this cosmetic the "Double Paste of Sultans." To

complete the work, he applied the same recipe to the manufacture of a

lotion for the complexion, which he called the "Carminative Balm." He

imitated in his own line the system of the Petit-Matelot, and was the

first perfumer to display that redundancy of placards, advertisements,

and other methods of publication which are called, perhaps unjustly,

charlatanism.

The Paste of Sultans and the Carminative Balm were ushered into the

world of fashion and commerce by colored placards, at the head of

which were these words, "Approved by the Institute." This formula,

used for the first time, had a magical effect. Not only all France,

but the continent flaunted with the posters, yellow, red, and blue, of

the monarch of the "The Queen of Roses," who kept in stock, supplied,

and manufactured, at moderate prices, all that belonged to his trade.

At a period when nothing was talked of but the East, to name any sort

of cosmetic the "Paste of Sultans" thus divining the magic force of

such words in a land where every man hoped to be a sultan as much as

every woman longed to be a sultana, was an inspiration which could

only have come to a common man or a man of genius. The public always

judges by results. Birotteau passed for a superior man, commercially

speaking; all the more because he compiled a prospectus whose

ridiculous phraseology was an element of success. In France they only

made fun of things which occupy the public mind, and the public does

not occupy itself with things that do not succeed. Though Birotteau

perpetrated this folly in good faith and not as a trick, the world

gave him credit for knowing how to play the fool for a purpose. We

have found, not without difficulty, a copy of this prospectus at the

establishment of Popinot and Co., druggists, Rue des Lombards. This

curious document belongs to the class which, in a higher sphere,

historians call /pieces justificatives/. We give it here:

THE DOUBLE PASTE OF SULTANS

AND CARMINATIVE BALM

Of Cesar Birotteau.

MARVELLOUS DISCOVERY!

Approved by the Institute of France.

"For many years a paste for the hands and a lotion for the face

offering superior results to those obtained from Eau-de-Cologne in

the domain of the toilet, has been widely sought by both sexes in

Europe. Devoting long vigils to the study of the skin and cuticle

of the two sexes, each of whom, one as much as the other, attach

the utmost importance to the softness, suppleness, brilliancy, and

velvet texture of the complexion, the Sieur Birotteau, perfumer,

favorably known in this metropolis and abroad, has discovered a

Paste and a Lotion justly hailed as marvellous by the fashion and

elegance of Paris. In point of fact, this Paste and this Lotion

possess amazing properties which act upon the skin without

prematurely wrinkling it,--the inevitable result of drugs

thoughtlessly employed, and sold in these days by ignorance and

cupidity. This discovery rests upon diversities of temperament,

which divide themselves into two great classes, indicated by the

color of the Paste and the Lotion, which will be found /pink/ for

the skin and cuticle of persons of lymphatic habit, and /white/

for those possessed of a sanguine temperament.

"This Paste is named the 'Paste of Sultans,' because the discovery

was originally made for the Seraglio by an Arabian physician. It

has been approved by the Institute on the recommendation of our

illustrious chemist, Vauquelin; together with the Lotion,

fabricated on the same principles which govern the composition of

the Paste.

"This precious Paste, exhaling as it does the sweetest perfumes,

removes all blotches, even those that are obstinately rebellious,

whitens the most recalcitrant epidermis, and dissipates the

perspirations of the hand, of which both sexes equally complain.

"The Carminative Balm will disperse the little pimples which

appear inopportunely at certain times, and interfere with a lady's

projects for a ball; it refreshes and revives the color by opening

or shutting the pores of the skin according to the exigencies of

the individual temperament. It is so well known already for its

effect in arresting the ravages of time that many, out of

gratitude, have called it the 'Friend of Beauty.'

"Eau-de-Cologne is, purely and simply, a trivial perfume without

special efficacy of any kind; while the Double Paste of Sultans

and the Carminative Balm are two operative compounds, of a motive

power which acts without risk upon the internal energies and

seconds them. Their perfumes (essentially balsamic, and of a

stimulating character which admirably revives the heart and brain)

awake ideas and vivify them; they are as wonderful for their

simplicity as for their merits. In short, they offer one

attraction the more to women, and to men a means of seduction

which it is within their power to secure.

"The daily use of the Balm will relieve the smart occasioned by

the heat of the razor; it will protect the lips from chapping, and

restore their color; it dispels in time all discolorations, and

revives the natural tones of the skin. Such results demonstrate in

man a perfect equilibrium of the juices of life, which tends to

relieve all persons subject to headache from the sufferings of

that horrible malady. Finally, the Carminative Balm, which can be

employed by women in all stages of their toilet, will prevent

cutaneous diseases by facilitating the transpiration of the

tissues, and communicating to them a permanent texture like that

of velvet.

"Address, post-paid, Monsieur Cesar Birotteau, successor to Ragon,

former perfumer to the Queen Marie Antoinette, at The Queen of

Roses, Rue Saint-Honore, Paris, near the Place Vendome.

"The price of a cake of Paste is three francs; that of the bottle

six francs.

"Monsieur Cesar Birotteau, to avoid counterfeits, informs the

public that the Paste is wrapped in paper bearing his signature,

and that the bottles have a stamp blown in the glass."

The success was owing, without Cesar's suspecting it, to Constance,

who advised him to send cases of the Carminative Balm and the Paste of

Sultans to all perfumers in France and in foreign cities, offering

them at the same time a discount of thirty per cent if they would buy

the two articles by the gross. The Paste and the Balm were, in

reality, worth more than other cosmetics of the sort; and they

captivated ignorant people by the distinctions they set up among the

temperaments. The five hundred perfumers of France, allured by the

discount, each bought annually from Birotteau more than three hundred

gross of the Paste and the Lotion,--a consumption which, if it gave

only a limited profit on each article, became enormous considered in

bulk. Cesar was then able to buy the huts and the land in the Faubourg

du Temple; he built large manufactories, and decorated his shop at

"The Queen of Roses" with much magnificence; his household began to

taste the little joys of competence, and his wife no longer trembled

as before.

In 1810 Madame Cesar, foreseeing a rise in rents, pushed her husband

into becoming chief tenant of the house where they had hitherto

occupied only the shop and the /entresol/, and advised him to remove

their own appartement to the first floor. A fortunate event induced

Constance to shut her eyes to the follies which Birotteau committed

for her sake in fitting up the new appartement. The perfumer had just

been elected judge in the commercial courts: his integrity, his well-

known sense of honor, and the respect he enjoyed, earned for him this

dignity, which ranked him henceforth among the leading merchants of

Paris. To improve his knowledge, he rose daily at five o'clock, and

read law-reports and books treating of commercial litigation. His

sense of justice, his rectitude, his conscientious intentions,--

qualities essential to the understanding of questions submitted for

consular decision,--soon made him highly esteemed among the judges.

His defects contributed not a little to his reputation. Conscious of

his inferiority, Cesar subordinated his own views to those of his

colleagues, who were flattered in being thus deferred to. Some sought

the silent approbation of a man held to be sagacious, in his capacity

of listener; others, charmed with his modesty and gentleness, praised

him publicly. Plaintiffs and defendants extolled his kindness, his

conciliatory spirit; and he was often chosen umpire in contests where

his own good sense would have suggested the swift justice of a Turkish

cadi. During his whole period in office he contrived to use language

which was a medley of commonplaces mixed with maxims and computations

served up in flowing phrases mildly put forth, which sounded to the

ears of superficial people like eloquence. Thus he pleased that great

majority, mediocre by nature, who are condemned to perpetual labor and

to views which are of the earth earthy. Cesar, however, lost so much

time in court that his wife obliged him finally to resign the

expensive dignity.

Towards 1813, the Birotteau household, thanks to its constant harmony,

and after steadily plodding on through life, saw the dawn of an era of

prosperity which nothing seemed likely to interrupt. Monsieur and

Madame Ragon, their predecessors, the uncle Pillerault, Roguin the

notary, the Messrs. Matifat, druggists in the Rue des Lombards and

purveyors to "The Queen of Roses," Joseph Lebas, woollen draper and

successor to the Messrs. Guillaume at the Maison du Chat-qui-pelote

(one of the luminaries of the Rue Saint-Denis), Popinot the judge,

brother of Madame Ragon, Chiffreville of the firm of Protez &

Chiffreville, Monsieur and Madame Cochin, employed in the treasury

department and sleeping partners in the house of Matifat, the Abbe

Loraux, confessor and director of the pious members of this coterie,

with a few other persons, made up the circle of their friends. In

spite of the royalist sentiments of Birotteau, public opinion was in

his favor; he was considered very rich, though in fact he possessed

only a hundred thousand francs over and above his business. The

regularity of his affairs, his punctuality, his habit of making no

debts, of never discounting his paper, and of taking, on the contrary,

safe securities from those whom he could thus oblige, together with

his general amiability, won him enormous credit. His household cost

him nearly twenty thousand francs a year, and the education of

Cesarine, an only daughter, idolized by Constance as well as by

himself, necessitated heavy expenses. Neither husband nor wife

considered money when it was a question of giving pleasure to their

child, from whom they had never been willing to separate. Imagine the

happiness of the poor parvenu peasant as he listened to his charming

Cesarine playing a sonata of Steibelt's on the piano, and singing a

ballad; or when he found her writing the French language correctly, or

reading Racine, father and son, and explaining their beauties, or

sketching a landscape, or painting in sepia! What joy to live again in

a flower so pure, so lovely, which had never left the maternal stem;

an angel whose budding graces and whose earliest developments he had

passionately watched; an only daughter, incapable of despising her

father, or of ridiculing his defective education, so truly was she an

ingenuous young girl.

When he first came to Paris, Cesar had known how to read, write, and

cipher, but his education stopped there; his laborious life had kept

him from acquiring ideas and knowledge outside the business of

perfumery. Mixing wholly with people to whom science and letters were

of no importance, and whose information did not go beyond their

specialty, having no time to give to higher studies, the perfumer had

become a merely practical man. He adopted necessarily the language,

blunders, and opinions of the bourgeois of Paris, who admires Moliere,

Voltaire, and Rousseau on faith, and buys their books without ever

reading them; who maintains that people should say /ormoires/, because

women put away their gold and their dresses and moire in those

articles of furniture, and that it is only a corruption of the

language to say /armoires/. Potier, Talma, and Mademoiselle Mars were

ten times millionaires, and did not live like other human beings; the

great tragedian ate raw meat, and Mademoiselle Mars sometimes drank

dissolved pearls, in imitation of a celebrated Egyptian actress. The

Emperor had leather pockets in his waistcoat, so that he could take

his snuff by the handful; he rode on horseback at full gallop up the

stairway of the orangery at Versailles. Writers and artists died in

the hospital, as a natural consequence of their eccentricities; they

were, moreover, all atheists, and people should be very careful not to

admit them into their households. Joseph Lebas cited with horror the

history of his step-sister Augustine's marriage with the painter

Sommervieux. Astronomers lived on spiders.

These striking points of information on the French language, on

dramatic art, politics, literature, and science, will explain the

bearings of the bourgeois intellect. A poet passing through the Rue

des Lombards may dream of Araby as he inhales certain perfumes. He may

admire the /danseuses/ in a /chauderie/, as he breathes the odors of

an Indian root. Dazzled by the blaze of cochineal, he recalls the

poems of the Veda, the religion of Brahma and its castes; brushing

against piles of ivory in the rough, he mounts the backs of elephants;

seated in a muslin cage, he makes love like the King of Lahore. But

the little retail merchant is ignorant from whence have come, or where

may grow, the products in which he deals. Birotteau, perfumer, did not

know an iota of natural history, nor of chemistry. Though regarding

Vauquelin as a great man, he thought him an exception,--of about the

same capacity as the retired grocer who summed up a discussion on the

method of importing teas, by remarking with a knowing air, "There are

but two ways: tea comes either by caravan, or by Havre." According to

Birotteau aloes and opium were only to be found in the Rue des

Lombards. Rosewater, said to be brought from Constantinople, was made

in Paris like eau-de-cologne. The names of these places were shams,

invented to please Frenchmen who could not endure the things of their

own country. A French merchant must call his discoveries English to

make them fashionable, just as in England the druggists attribute

theirs to France.

Nevertheless, Cesar was incapable of being wholly stupid or a fool.

Honesty and goodness cast upon all the acts of his life a light which

made them creditable; for noble conduct makes even ignorance seem

worthy. Success gave him confidence. In Paris confidence is accepted

as power, of which it is the outward sign. As for Madame Birotteau,

having measured Cesar during the first three years of their married

life, she was a prey to continual terror. She represented in their

union the sagacious and fore-casting side,--doubt, opposition, and

fear; while Cesar, on the other hand, was the embodiment of audacity,

energy, and the inexpressible delights of fatalism. Yet in spite of

these appearances the husband often quaked, while the wife, in

reality, was possessed of patience and true courage.

Thus it happened that a man who was both mediocre and pusillanimous,

without education, without ideas, without knowledge, without force of

character, and who might be expected not to succeed in the slipperiest

city in the world, came by his principles of conduct, by his sense of

justice, by the goodness of a heart that was truly Christian, and

through his love for the only woman he had really won, to be

considered as a remarkable man, courageous, and full of resolution.

The public saw results only. Excepting Pillerault and Popinot the

judge, all the people of his own circle knew him superficially, and

were unable to judge him. Moreover, the twenty or thirty friends he

had collected about him talked the same nonsense, repeated the same

commonplaces, and all thought themselves superior in their own line.

The women vied with each other in dress and good dinners; each had

said her all when she dropped a contemptuous word about her husband.

Madame Birotteau alone had the good sense to treat hers with honor and

respect in public; she knew him to be a man who, in spite of his

secret disabilities, had earned their fortune, and whose good name she

shared. It is true that she sometimes asked herself what sort of world

this could be, if all the men who were thought superior were like her

husband. Such conduct contributed not a little to maintain the

respectful esteem bestowed upon the perfumer in a community where

women are much inclined to complain of their husbands and bring them

into discredit.

*****

The first days of the year 1814, so fatal to imperial France, were

marked at the Birotteaus by two events, not especially remarkable in

other households, but of a nature to impress such simple souls as

Cesar and his wife, who casting their eyes along the past could find

nothing but tender memories. They had taken as head-clerk a young man

twenty-two years of age, named Ferdinand du Tillet. This lad--who had

just left a perfumery where he was refused a share in the business,

and who was reckoned a genius--had made great efforts to get employed

at "The Queen of Roses," whose methods, facilities, and customs were

well known to him. Birotteau took him, and gave him a salary of a

thousand francs, intending to make him eventually his successor.

Ferdinand had so great an influence on the destinies of this family

that it is necessary to say a few words about him. In the first place

he was named simply Ferdinand, without surname. This anonymous

condition seemed to him an immense advantage at the time when Napoleon

conscripted all families to fill the ranks. He was, however, born

somewhere, as the result of some cruel and voluptuous caprice. The

following are the only facts preserved about his civil condition. In

1793 a poor girl of Tillet, a village near Andelys, came by night and

gave birth to a child in the garden of the curate of the church at

Tillet, and after rapping on the window-shutters went away and drowned

herself. The good priest took the child, gave him the name of the

saint inscribed on the calendar for that day, and fed and brought him

up as his own son. The curate died in 1804, without leaving enough

property to carry on the education he had begun. Ferdinand, thrown

upon Paris, led a filibustering life whose chances might bring him to

the scaffold, to fortune, the bar, the army, commerce, or domestic

life. Obliged to live like a Figaro, he was first a commercial

traveller, then a perfumer's clerk in Paris, where he turned up after

traversing all France, having studied the world and made up his mind

to succeed at any price.

In 1813 Ferdinand thought it necessary to register his age, and obtain

a civil standing by applying to the courts at Andelys for a judgment,

which should enable his baptismal record to be transferred from the

registry of the parish to that of the mayor's office; and he obtained

permission to rectify the document by inserting the name of du Tillet,

under which he was known, and which legally belonged to him through

the fact of his exposure and abandonment in that township. Without

father, mother, or other guardian than the /procureur imperial/, alone

in the world and owing no duty to any man, he found society a hard

stepmother, and he handled it, in his turn, without gloves,--as the

Turks the Moors; he knew no guide but his own interests, and any means

to fortune he considered good. This young Norman, gifted with

dangerous abilities, coupled his desires for success with the harsh

defects which, justly or unjustly, are attributed to the natives of

his province. A wheedling manner cloaked a quibbling mind, for he was

in truth a hard judicial wrangler. But if he boldly contested the

rights of others, he certainly yielded none of his own; he attacked

his adversary at the right moment, and wearied him out with his

inflexible persistency. His merits were those of the Scapins of

ancient comedy; he had their fertility of resource, their cleverness

in skirting evil, their itching to lay hold of all that was good to

keep. In short, he applied to his own poverty a saying which the Abbe

Terray uttered in the name of the State,--he kept a loophole to become

in after years an honest man. Gifted with passionate energy, with a

boldness that was almost military in requiring good as well as evil

actions from those about him, and justifying such demands on the

theory of personal interest, he despised men too much, believing them

all corruptible, he was too unscrupulous in the choice of means,

thinking all equally good, he was too thoroughly convinced that the

success of money was the absolution of all moral mechanism, not to

attain his ends sooner or later.

Such a man, standing between the hulks and a vast fortune, was

necessarily vindictive, domineering, quick in decisions, yet as

dissimulating as a Cromwell planning to decapitate the head of

integrity. His real depth was hidden under a light and jesting mind.

Mere clerk as he was, his ambition knew no bounds. With one

comprehensive glance of hatred he had taken in the whole of society,

saying boldly to himself, "Thou shalt be mine!" He had vowed not to

marry till he was forty, and kept his word. Physically, Ferdinand was

a tall, slender young man, with a good figure and adaptive manners,

which enabled him to take, on occasion, the key-note of the various

societies in which he found himself. His ignoble face was rather

pleasant at first sight; but later, on closer acquaintance,

expressions were caught such as come to the surface of those who are

ill at ease in their own minds, and whose consciences groan at certain

times. His complexion, which was sanguine under the soft skin of a

Norman, had a crude or acrid color. The glance of his eye, whose iris

was circled with a whitish rim as if it were lined with silver, was

evasive yet terrible when he fixed it straight upon his victim. His

voice had a hollow sound, like that of a man worn out with much

speaking. His thin lips were not wanting in charm, but his pointed

nose and slightly projecting forehead showed defects of race; and his

hair, of a tint like hair that has been dyed black, indicated a

mongrel descent, through which he derived his mental qualities from

some libertine lord, his low instincts from a seduced peasant-girl,

his knowledge from an incomplete education, and his vices from his

deserted and abandoned condition.

Birotteau discovered with much amazement that his clerk went out in

the evening very elegantly dressed, came home late, and was seen at

the balls of bankers and notaries. Such habits displeased Cesar,

according to whose ideas clerks should study the books of the firm and

think only of their business. The worthy man was shocked by trifles,

and reproached du Tillet gently for wearing linen that was too fine,

for leaving cards on which his name was inscribed, F. du Tillet,--a

fashion, according to commercial jurisprudence, which belonged only to

the great world. Ferdinand had entered the employ of this Orgon with

the intentions of a Tartuffe. He paid court to Madame Cesar, tried to

seduce her, and judged his master very much as the wife judged him

herself, and all with alarming rapidity. Though discreet, reserved,

and accustomed to say only what he meant to say, du Tillet unbosomed

his opinions on men and life in a way to shock a scrupulous woman who

shared the religious feelings of her husband, and who thought it a

crime to do the least harm to a neighbor. In spite of Madame

Birotteau's caution, du Tillet suspected the contempt in which she

held him. Constance, to whom Ferdinand had written a few love-letters,

soon noticed a change in his manners, which grew presuming, as if

intended to convey the idea of a mutual good understanding. Without

giving the secret reason to her husband, she advised him to send

Ferdinand away. Birotteau agreed with his wife, and the dismissal was

determined upon.

Two days before it was carried into effect, on a Saturday night when

Birotteau was making up his monthly accounts, three thousand francs

were found to be missing. His consternation was dreadful, less for the

loss than for the suspicions which fell upon three clerks, one cook, a

shop-boy, and several habitual workmen. On whom should he lay the

blame? Madame Birotteau never left her counter. The clerk who had

charge of the desk was a nephew of Monsieur Ragon named Popinot, a

young man nineteen years old, who lived with the Birotteaus and was

integrity itself. His figures, which disagreed with the money in the

desk, revealed the deficit, and showed that the abstraction had been

made after the balance had been added up. Husband and wife resolved to

keep silence and watch the house. On the following day, Sunday, they

received their friends. The families who made up their coterie met at

each other's houses for little festivities, turn and turn about. While

playing at /bouillote/, Roguin the notary placed on the card-table

some old louis d'or which Madame Cesar had taken only a few days

before from a bride, Madame d'Espart.

"Have you been robbing the poor-box?" asked the perfumer, laughing.

Roguin replied that he had won the money, at the house of a banker,

from du Tillet, who confirmed the answer without blushing. Cesar, on

the other hand, grew scarlet. When the evening was over, and just as

Ferdinand was going to bed, Birotteau took him into the shop on a

pretext of business.

"Du Tillet," said the worthy man, "three thousand francs are missing

from the desk. I suspect no one; but the circumstance of the old louis

seems too much against you not to oblige me to speak of it. We will

not go to bed till we have found where the error lies,--for, after

all, it may be only an error. Perhaps you took something on account of

your salary?"

Du Tillet said at once that he had taken the louis. The perfumer

opened his ledger and found that his clerk's account had not been

debited.

"I was in a hurry; but I ought to have made Popinot enter the sum,"

said Ferdinand.

"That is true," said Birotteau, bewildered by the cool unconcern of

the Norman, who well knew the worthy people among whom he had come

meaning to make his fortune. The perfumer and his clerk passed the

whole night in examining accounts, a labor which the good man knew to

be useless. In coming and going about the desk Cesar slipped three

bills of a thousand francs each into the money-drawer, catching them

against the top of it; then he pretended to be much fatigued and to

fall asleep and snore. Du Tillet awoke him triumphantly, with an

excessive show of joy at discovering the error. The next day Birotteau

scolded Popinot and his little wife publicly, as if very angry with

them for their negligence. Fifteen days later Ferdinand du Tillet got

a situation with a stockbroker. He said perfumery did not suit him,

and he wished to learn banking. In leaving Birotteau, he spoke of

Madame Cesar in a way to make people suppose that his master had

dismissed him out of jealousy. A few months later, however, du Tillet

went to see Birotteau and asked his endorsement for twenty thousand

francs, to enable him to make up the securities he needed in an

enterprise which was to put him on the high-road to fortune. Observing

the surprise which Cesar showed at this impudence, du Tillet frowned,

and asked if he had no confidence in him. Matifat and two other

merchants, who were present on business with Birotteau, also observed

the indignation of the perfumer, who repressed his anger in their

presence. Du Tillet, he thought, might have become an honest man; his

previous fault might have been committed for some mistress in distress

or from losses at cards; the public reprobation of an honest man might

drive one still young, and possibly repentant, into a career of crime.

So this angel took up his pen and endorsed du Tillet's notes, telling

him that he was heartily willing thus to oblige a lad who had been

very useful to him. The blood rushed to his face as he uttered the

falsehood. Du Tillet could not meet his eye, and no doubt vowed to him

at that moment the undying hatred which the spirits of darkness feel

towards the angels of light.

From this time du Tillet held his balance-pole so well as he danced

the tight-rope of financial speculation, that he was rich and elegant

in appearance before he became so in reality. As soon as he got hold

of a cabriolet he was always in it; he kept himself in the high sphere

of those who mingle business with pleasure, and make the foyer of the

opera-house a branch of the Bourse,--in short, the Turcarets of the

period. Thanks to Madame Roguin, whom he had known at the Birotteau's,

he was received at once among people of the highest standing in

finance; and, at the moment of which we write, he had reached a

prosperity in which there was nothing fictitious. He was on the best

terms with the house of Nucingen, to which Roguin had introduced him,

and he had promptly become connected with the brothers Keller and with

several other great banking-houses. No one knew from whence this youth

had derived the immense capital which he handled, but every one

attributed his success to his intelligence and his integrity.

*****

The Restoration made Cesar a personage, and the turmoil of political

crises naturally lessened his recollection of these domestic

misadventures. The constancy of his royalist opinions (to which he had

become exceedingly indifferent since his wound, though he remained

faithful to them out of decency) and the memory of his devotion in

Vendemiaire won him very high patronage, precisely because he had

asked for none. He was appointed major in the National Guard, although

he was utterly incapable of giving the word of command. In 1815

Napoleon, always his enemy, dismissed him. During the Hundred Days

Birotteau was the bugbear of the liberals of his quarter; for it was

not until 1815 that differences of political opinion grew up among

merchants, who had hitherto been unanimous in their desires for public

tranquillity, of which, as they knew, business affairs stood much in

need.

At the second Restoration the royal government was obliged to remodel

the municipality of Paris. The prefect wished to nominate Birotteau as

mayor. Thanks to his wife, the perfumer would only accept the place of

deputy-mayor, which brought him less before the public. Such modesty

increased the respect generally felt for him, and won him the

friendship of the new mayor, Monsieur Flamet de la Billardiere.

Birotteau, who had seen him in the shop in the days when "The Queen of

Roses" was the headquarters of royalist conspiracy, mentioned him to

the prefect of the Seine when that official consulted Cesar on the

choice to be made. Monsieur and Madame Birotteau were therefore never

forgotten in the invitations of the mayor. Madame Birotteau frequently

took up the collections at Saint-Roch in the best of good company. La

Billardiere warmly supported Birotteau when the question of bestowing

the crosses given to the municipality came up, and dwelt upon his

wound at Saint-Roch, his attachment to the Bourbons, and the respect

which he enjoyed. The government, wishing on the one hand to cheapen

Napoleon's order by lavishing the cross of the Legion of honor, and on

the other to win adherents and rally to the Bourbons the various

trades and men of arts and sciences, included Birotteau in the coming

promotion. This honor, which suited well with the show that Cesar made

in his arrondissement, put him in a position where the ideas of a man

accustomed to succeed naturally enlarged themselves. The news which

the mayor had just given him of his preferment was the determining

reason that decided him to plunge into the scheme which he now for the

first time revealed to his wife; he believed it would enable him to

give up perfumery all the more quickly, and rise into the regions of

the higher bourgeoisie of Paris.

Cesar was now forty years old. The work he had undertaken in his

manufactories had given him a few premature wrinkles, and had slightly

silvered the thick tufts of hair on which the pressure of his hat left

a shining circle. His forehead, where the hair grew in a way to mark

five distinct points, showed the simplicity of his life. The heavy

eyebrows were not alarming because the limpid glance of his frank blue

eyes harmonized with the open forehead of an honest man. His nose,

broken at the bridge and thick at the end, gave him the wondering look

of a gaby in the streets of Paris. His lips were very thick, and his

large chin fell in a straight line below them. His face, high-colored

and square in outline, revealed, by the lines of its wrinkles and by

the general character of its expression, the ingenuous craftiness of a

peasant. The strength of his body, the stoutness of his limbs, the

squareness of his shoulders, the width of his feet,--all denoted the

villager transplanted to Paris. His powerful hairy hands, with their

large square nails, would alone have attested his origin if other

vestiges had not remained in various parts of his person. His lips

wore the cordial smile which shopkeepers put on when a customer

enters; but this commercial sunshine was really the image of his

inward content, and pictured the state of his kindly soul. His

distrust never went beyond the lines of his business, his craftiness

left him on the steps of the Bourse, or when he closed the pages of

his ledger. Suspicion was to him very much what his printed bill-

heads were,--a necessity of the sale itself. His countenance presented

a sort of comical assurance and conceit mingled with good nature,

which gave it originality and saved it from too close a resemblance to

the insipid face of a Parisian bourgeois. Without this air of naive

self-admiration and faith in his own person, he would have won too

much respect; he drew nearer to his fellows by thus contributing his

quota of absurdity. When speaking, he habitually crossed his hands

behind his back. When he thought he had said something striking or

gallant, he rose imperceptibly on the points of his toes twice, and

dropped back heavily on his heels, as if to emphasize what he said. In

the midst of an argument he might be seen turning round upon himself

and walking off a few steps, as if he had gone to find objections with

which he returned upon his adversary brusquely. He never interrupted,

and was sometimes a victim to this careful observance of civility; for

others would take the words out of his mouth, and the good man had to

yield his ground without opening his lips. His great experience in

commercial matters had given him a few fixed habits, which some people

called eccentricities. If a note were overdue he sent for the bailiff,

and thought only of recovering capital, interest, and costs; and the

bailiff was ordered to pursue the matter until the debtor went into

bankruptcy. Cesar then stopped all proceedings, never appeared at any

meeting of creditors, and held on to his securities. He adopted this

system and his implacable contempt for bankrupts from Monsieur Ragon,

who in the course of his commercial life had seen such loss of time in

litigation that he had come to look upon the meagre and uncertain

dividends obtained by such compromises as fully counterbalanced by a

better employment of the time spent in coming and going, in making

proposals, or in listening to excuses for dishonesty.

"If the bankrupt is an honest man, and recovers himself, he will pay

you," Ragon would say. "If he is without means and simply unfortunate,

why torment him? If he is a scoundrel, you will never get anything.

Your known severity will make you seem uncompromising; it will be

impossible to negotiate with you; consequently you are the one who

will get paid as long as there is anything to pay with."

Cesar came to all appointments at the expected hour; but if he were

kept waiting, he left ten minutes later with an inflexibility which

nothing ever changed. Thus his punctuality compelled all persons who

had dealings with him to be punctual themselves.

The dress adopted by the worthy man was in keeping with his manners

and his countenance. No power could have made him give up the white

muslin cravats, with ends embroidered by his wife or daughter, which

hung down beneath his chin. His waistcoat of white pique, squarely

buttoned, came down low over his stomach, which was rather

protuberant, for he was somewhat fat. He wore blue trousers, black

silk stockings, and shoes with ribbon ties, which were often

unfastened. His surtout coat, olive-green and always too large, and

his broad-brimmed hat gave him the air of a Quaker. When he dressed

for the Sunday evening festivities he put on silk breeches, shoes with

gold buckles, and the inevitable square waistcoat, whose front edges

opened sufficiently to show a pleated shirt-frill. His coat, of maroon

cloth, had wide flaps and long skirts. Up to the year 1819 he kept up

the habit of wearing two watch-chains, which hung down in parallel

lines; but he only put on the second when he dressed for the evening.

*****

Such was Cesar Birotteau; a worthy man, to whom the fates presiding at

the birth of men had denied the faculty of judging politics and life

in their entirety, and of rising above the social level of the middle

classes; who followed ignorantly the track of routine, whose opinions

were all imposed upon him from the outside and applied by him without

examination. Blind but good, not spiritual but deeply religious, he

had a pure heart. In that heart there shone one love, the light and

strength of his life; for his desire to rise in life, and the limited

knowledge he had gained of the world, both came from his affection for

his wife and for his daughter.

As for Madame Cesar, then thirty-seven years old, she bore so close a

resemblance to the Venus of Milo that all who knew her recognized the

likeness when the Duc de Riviere sent the beautiful statue to Paris.

In a few months sorrows were to dim with yellowing tints that dazzling

fairness, to hollow and blacken the bluish circle round the lovely

greenish-gray eyes so cruelly that she then wore the look of an old

Madonna; for amid the coming ruin she retained her gentle sincerity,

her pure though saddened glance; and no one ever thought her less than

a beautiful woman, whose bearing was virtuous and full of dignity. At

the ball now planned by Cesar she was to shine with a last lustre of

beauty, remarked upon at the time and long remembered.

Every life has its climax,--a period when causes are at work, and are

in exact relation to results. This mid-day of life, when living forces

find their equilibrium and put forth their productive powers with full

effect, is common not only to organized beings but to cities, nations,

ideas, institutions, commerce, and commercial enterprises, all of

which, like noble races and dynasties, are born and rise and fall.

From whence comes the vigor with which this law of growth and decay

applies itself to all organized things in this lower world? Death

itself, in times of scourge, has periods when it advances, slackens,

sinks back, and slumbers. Our globe is perhaps only a rocket a little

more continuing than the rest. History, recording the causes of the

rise and fall of all things here below, could enlighten man as to the

moment when he might arrest the play of all his faculties; but neither

the conquerors, nor the actors, nor the women, nor the writers in the

great drama will listen to the salutary voice.

Cesar Birotteau, who might with reason think himself at the apogee of

his fortunes, used this crucial pause as the point of a new departure.

He did not know, moreover neither nations nor kings have attempted to

make known in characters ineffaceable, the cause of the vast

overthrows with which history teems, and of which so many royal and

commercial houses offer signal examples. Why are there no modern

pyramids to recall ceaselessly the one principle which dominates the

common-weal of nations and of individual life? /When the effect

produced is no longer in direct relation nor in equal proportion to

the cause, disorganization has begun./ And yet such monuments stand

everywhere; it is tradition and the stones of the earth which tell us

of the past, which set a seal upon the caprices of indomitable

destiny, whose hand wipes out our dreams, and shows us that all great

events are summed up in one idea. Troy and Napoleon are but poems. May

this present history be the poem of middle-class vicissitudes, to

which no voice has given utterance because they have seemed poor in

dignity, enormous as they are in volume. It is not one man with whom

we are now to deal, but a whole people, or world, of sorrows.