nfold;
he is not to be cheated; he knows the tricks of the trade. The monster
among his treasures looks like some old hag among a score of young girls
that she offers to the public. Beauty and miracles of art are alike
indifferent to him; subtle and dense as he is, he has a keen eye to
profits, he talks roughly to those who know less than he does; he has
learned to act a part, he pretends to love his pictures, or again he
lets you know the price he himself gave for the things, he offers to let
you see the memoranda of the sale. He is a Proteus; in one hour he can
be Jocrisse, Janot, _Queue-rouge_, Mondor, Hapagon, or Nicodeme.

The third year found armor, and old pictures, and some tolerably fine
clocks in Remonencq's shop. He sent for his sister, and La Remonencq
came on foot all the way from Auvergne to take charge of the shop while
her brother was away. A big and very ugly woman, dressed like a Japanese
idol, a half-idiotic creature with a vague, staring gaze she would not
bate a centime of the prices fixed by her brother. In the intervals
of business she did the work of the house, and solved the apparently
insoluble problem--how to live on "the mists of the Seine." The
Remonencqs' diet consisted of bread and herrings, with the outside
leaves of lettuce or vegetable refuse selected from the heaps deposited
in the kennel before the doors of eating-houses. The two between them
did not spend more than fivepence a day on food (bread included), and La
Remonencq earned the money by sewing or spinning.

Remonencq came to Paris in the first instance to work as an errand-boy.
Between the years 1825 and 1831 he ran errands for dealers in
curiosities in the Boulevard Beaumarchais or coppersmiths in the Rue
de Lappe. It is the usual start in life in his line of business. Jews,
Normans, Auvergnats, and Savoyards, those four different races of men
all have the same instincts, and make their fortunes in the same way;
they spend nothing, make small profits, and let them accumulate at
compound interest. Such is their trading charter, and _that_ charter is
no delusion.

Remonencq at this moment had made it up with his old master Monistrol;
he did business with wholesale dealers, he was a _chineur_ (the
technical word), plying his trade in the _banlieue_, which, as everybody
knows, extends for some forty leagues round Paris.

After fourteen years of business, he had sixty thousand francs in hand
and a well-stocked shop. He lived in