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 ****** 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.
