for General Foy's children reached a million
francs. Lyons has drawn her own conclusions; she knows France, she knows
that there is no religion left. The story of Richard Lenoir is one of
those blunders which Fouche condemned as worse than a crime."

"Suppose that there is a tinge of charlatanism in the way in which
concerns are put before the public," began Couture, returning to the
charge, "that word charlatanism has come to be a damaging expression, a
middle term, as it were, between right and wrong; for where, I ask you,
does charlatanism begin? where does it end? what is charlatanism? do
me the kindness of telling me what it is _not_. Now for a little plain
speaking, the rarest social ingredient. A business which should consist
in going out at night to look for goods to sell in the day would
obviously be impossible. You find the instinct of forestalling the
market in the very match-seller. How to forestall the market--that is
the one idea of the so-called honest tradesman of the Rue Saint-Denis,
as of the most brazen-fronted speculator. If stocks are heavy, sell you
must. If sales are slow, you must tickle your customer; hence the
signs of the Middle Ages, hence the modern prospectus. I do not see a
hair's-breadth of difference between attracting custom and forcing your
goods upon the consumer. It may happen, it is sure to happen, it often
happens, that a shopkeeper gets hold of damaged goods, for the seller
always cheats the buyer. Go and ask the most upright folk in Paris--the
best known men in business, that is--and they will all triumphantly tell
you of dodges by which they passed off stock which they knew to be bad
upon the public. The well-known firm of Minard began by sales of this
kind. In the Rue Saint-Denis they sell nothing but 'greased silk'; it
is all that they can do. The most honest merchants tell you in the most
candid way that 'you must get out of a bad bargain as best you can'--a
motto for the most unscrupulous rascality. Blondet has given you an
account of the Lyons affair, its causes and effects, and I proceed in my
turn to illustrate my theory with an anecdote:--There was once a woolen
weaver, an ambitious man, burdened with a large family of children by a
wife too much beloved. He put too much faith in the Republic, laid in a
stock of scarlet wool, and manufactured those red-knitted caps that you
may have noticed on the heads of all the street urchins in Paris. How
this came about I am just go