place of business was on the south quay, about a hundred yards west of
the custom-house. He had brought letters of high recommendation from
several eminent Paris firms; his capital was ascertained to be large;
and soon, moreover, approving him self to be a man of keen mercantile
discernment, and measured, peremptory, unswerving business habits, it
is not surprising that his commercial transactions speedily took a
wide range, or that, at the end of about fifteen years, M. Veron was
pronounced by general consent to be the wealthiest merchant of the
commercial capital of northern France. He was never, albeit, much of a
favourite with any class of society: his manner was too _brusque_,
decided, unbending--his speech too curt, frequently too bitter, for
that; but he managed to steer his course in very difficult times
quite as safely as those who put themselves to great pains and charges
to obtain popularity. He never expressed--publicly at least--any
preference for Royalism, Republicanism, or Imperialism; for
fleur-de-lis, bonnet-rouge, or tricolore: in short, Jean Baptiste
Veron was a stern, taciturn, self-absorbed man of business; and as
nothing else was universally concluded, till the installation of a
_quasi_ legitimacy by Napoleon Bonaparte, when a circumstance, slight
in itself, gave a clearer significance to the cold, haughty, repellent
expression which played habitually about the merchant's gray, deep-set
eyes, and thin, firmly-compressed lips. His newly-engraved private
card read thus:--'J. B. _de_ Veron, _Mon Sejour_, Ingouville.' Mon
Sejour was a charming suburban domicile, situate upon the Cote, as it
is usually termed-a sloping eminence on the north of Le Havre, which
it commands, and now dotted with similar residences, but at the period
we are writing of, very sparsely built upon. Not long after this
assumption of the aristocratic prefix to his name, it was discovered
that he had insinuated himself into the very narrow and exclusive
circle of the De Merodes, who were an unquestionable fragment of the
old noblesse, damaged, it is true, almost irretrievably in purse, as
their modest establishment on the Cote too plainly testified; but in
pedigree as untainted and resplendent as in the palmiest days of the
Capets. As the Chevalier de Merode and his daughter Mademoiselle
Henriette-Delphine-Hortense-Marie-Chasse-Loup de Merode--described as
a tall, fair, and extremely meagre damsel, of about thirty years of
age--wer