her 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 be