ed
by finding himself the head of the house, after buying out the senior
partners, both of whom retired into the country, leaving him their funds
to manage in the business at a low interest.

Pierre Graslin, then forty-seven years of age, was supposed to possess
about six hundred thousand francs. The estimate of his fortune had
lately increased throughout the department, in consequence of his outlay
in having built, in a new quarter of the town called the place d'Arbres
(thus assisting to give Limoges an improved aspect), a fine house, the
front of it being on a line with a public building with the facade of
which it corresponded. This house had now been finished six months, but
Pierre Graslin delayed furnishing it; it had cost him so much that he
shrank from the further expense of living in it. His vanity had led him
to transgress the wise laws by which he governed his life. He felt, with
the good sense of a business man, that the interior of the house
ought to correspond with the character of the outside. The furniture,
silver-ware, and other needful accessories to the life he would have to
lead in his new mansion would, he estimated, cost him nearly as much as
the original building. In spite, therefore, of the gossip of tongues and
the charitable suppositions of his neighbors, he continued to live on
in the damp, old, and dirty ground-floor apartment in the rue
Montantmanigne where his fortune had been made. The public carped,
but Graslin had the approval of his former partners, who praised a
resolution that was somewhat uncommon.

A fortune and a position like those of Pierre Graslin naturally excited
the greed of not a few in a small provincial city. During the last
ten years more than one proposition of marriage had been intimated to
Monsieur Graslin. But the bachelor state was so well suited to a man
who was busy from morning till night, overrun with work, eager in the
pursuit of money as a hunter for game, and always tired out with his
day's labor, that Graslin fell into none of the traps laid for him
by ambitious mothers who coveted so brilliant a position for their
daughters.

Graslin, another Sauviat in an upper sphere, did not spend more than
forty sous a day, and clothed himself no better than his under-clerk.
Two clerks and an office-boy sufficed him to carry on his business,
which was immense through the multiplicity of its details. One clerk
attended to the correspondence; the other had charge of the