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: