rgeoisie triumphant
found its incarnation in Crevel.

This apartment, at a rent of a thousand crowns, crammed with all the
vulgar magnificence that money can buy, occupied the first floor of a
fine old house between a courtyard and a garden. Everything was as
spick-and-span as the beetles in an entomological case, for Crevel
lived very little at home.

This gorgeous residence was the ambitious citizen's legal domicile.
His establishment consisted of a woman-cook and a valet; he hired two
extra men, and had a dinner sent in by Chevet, whenever he gave a
banquet to his political friends, to men he wanted to dazzle or to a
family party.

The seat of Crevel's real domesticity, formerly in the Rue Notre-Dame
de Lorette, with Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout, had lately been
transferred, as we have seen, to the Rue Chauchat. Every morning the
retired merchant--every ex-tradesman is a retired merchant--spent two
hours in the Rue des Saussayes to attend to business, and gave the
rest of his time to Mademoiselle Zaire, which annoyed Zaire very much.
Orosmanes-Crevel had a fixed bargain with Mademoiselle Heloise; she
owed him five hundred francs worth of enjoyment every month, and no
"bills delivered." He paid separately for his dinner and all extras.
This agreement, with certain bonuses, for he made her a good many
presents, seemed cheap to the ex-attache of the great singer; and he
would say to widowers who were fond of their daughters, that it paid
better to job your horses than to have a stable of your own. At the
same time, if the reader remembers the speech made to the Baron by the
porter at the Rue Chauchat, Crevel did not escape the coachman and the
groom.

Crevel, as may be seen, had turned his passionate affection for his
daughter to the advantage of his self-indulgence. The immoral aspect
of the situation was justified by the highest morality. And then the
ex-perfumer derived from this style of living--it was the inevitable,
a free-and-easy life, _Regence, Pompadour, Marechal de Richelieu_,
what not--a certain veneer of superiority. Crevel set up for being a
man of broad views, a fine gentleman with an air and grace, a liberal
man with nothing narrow in his ideas--and all for the small sum of
about twelve to fifteen hundred francs a month. This was the result
not of hypocritical policy, but of middle-class vanity, though it came
to the same in the end.

On the Bourse Crevel was regarded as a man superior to his ti