advanced he bought up caps and socks as
the Emperor gathered immortal palms by his very reverses. The genius was
equal on both sides, though exercised in different spheres; one aimed
at covering heads, the other at mowing them down. Obliged to create some
means of transportation in order to save his tons of hosiery, which he
stored in a suburb of Paris, Phileas often put in requisition horses
and army-waggons, as if the safety of the empire were concerned. But
the majesty of commerce was surely as precious as that of Napoleon. The
English merchants, in buying out the European markets, certainly got the
better of the colossus who threatened their trade.

By the time the Emperor abdicated at Fontainebleau, Phileas, triumphant,
was master of the situation. He maintained, by clever manoeuvring, the
depreciation in cottons, and doubled his fortune at the moment when his
luckiest competitors were getting rid of their merchandise at a loss
of fifty per cent. He returned to Arcis with a fortune of three hundred
thousand francs, half of which, invested on the Grand-Livre at sixty,
returned him an income of fifteen thousand francs a year. He employed
the remainder in building, furnishing, and adorning a handsome house on
the Place du Pont in Arcis.

On the return of the successful hosier, Monsieur Grevin was naturally
his confidant. The notary had an only daughter to marry, then twenty
years of age. Grevin, a widower, knew the fortune of Madame Beauvisage,
the mother, and he believed in the energy and capacity of a young man
bold enough to have turned the campaign of 1814 to his profit. Severine
Grevin had her mother's fortune of sixty thousand francs for her dower.
Grevin was then over fifty; he feared to die, and saw no chance of
marrying his daughter as he wished under the Restoration--for her, he
had had ambition. Under these circumstances he was shrewd enough to make
Phileas ask her in marriage.

Severine Grevin, a well-trained young lady and handsome, was considered
at that time the best match in Arcis. In fact, an alliance with the
intimate friend of the senator Comte de Gondreville, peer of France, was
certainly a great honor for the son of a Gondreville tenant-farmer. The
widow Beauvisage, his mother, would have made any sacrifice to obtain
it; but on learning the success of her son, she dispensed with the duty
of giving him a _dot_,--a wise economy which was imitated by the notary.

Thus was consummated the union of