te de
Gondreville. Phileas, who was then twenty-one years of age, had been
devoted for the last three years to the peaceable trade of hosiery.

Coming to the end of the lease of Bellache, old Madame Beauvisage
declined to renew it. She saw she had enough to do in her old age in
taking care of her property. That nothing might give her uneasiness
of mind, she proceeded, by the help of Monsieur Grevin, the notary
of Arcis, to liquidate her husband's estate, although her son made no
request whatever for a settlement. The result proved that she owed him
the sum of one hundred and fifty thousand francs. The good woman did not
sell her landed property, most of which came from the unfortunate Michu,
the former bailiff of the Simeuse family; she paid the sum to Phileas
in ready money,--advising him to buy out the business of his employer,
Monsieur Pigoult, the son of the old justice of the peace, whose affairs
were in so bad a way that his death, as we have said, was thought to be
voluntary.

Phileas Beauvisage, a virtuous youth, having a deep respect for his
mother, concluded the purchase from his patron, and as he had the bump
of what phrenologists term "acquisitiveness," his youthful ardor spent
itself upon this business, which he thought magnificent and desired to
increase by speculation.

The name of Phileas, which may seem peculiar, is only one of the many
oddities which we owe to the Revolution. Attached to the Simeuse family,
and consequently, good Catholics, the Beauvisage father and mother
desired to have their son baptized. The rector of Cinq-Cygne, the Abbe
Goujet, whom they consulted, advised them to give their son for patron
a saint whose Greek name might signify the municipality,--for the child
was born at a period when children were inscribed on the civil registers
under the fantastic names of the Republican calendar.

In 1814, hosiery, a stable business with few risks in ordinary times,
was subject to all the variations in the price of cotton. This price
depended at that time on the triumph or the defeat of the Emperor
Napoleon, whose adversaries, the English generals, used to say in Spain:
"The town is taken; now get out your bales."

Pigoult, former patron of young Phileas, furnished the raw material to
his workmen, who were scattered all over the country. At the time when
he sold the business to Beauvisage junior, he possessed a large amount
of raw cotton bought at a high price, whereas Lisbon was sendin