the Abbe Gaudron,
in company with a few neighbors and a certain Martin Falleix, a
brass-founder in the fauborg Saint-Antoine, to whom Saillard had loaned
the necessary money to establish a business. This Falleix, a
respectable Auvergnat who had come to seek his fortune in Paris with his
smelting-pot on his back, had found immediate employment with the firm
of Brezac, collectors of metals and other relics from all chateaux
in the provinces. About twenty-seven years of age, and spoiled, like
others, by success, Martin Falleix had had the luck to become the active
agent of Monsieur Saillard, the sleeping-partner in the working out of
a discovery made by Falleix in smelting (patent of invention and gold
medal granted at the exposition of 1825). Madame Baudoyer, whose only
daughter was treading--to use an expression of old Saillard's--on the
tail of her twelve years, laid claim to Falleix, a thickset, swarthy,
active young fellow, of shrewd principles, whose education she was
superintending. The said education, according to her ideas, consisted in
teaching him to play boston, to hold his cards properly, and not to let
others see his game; to shave himself regularly before he came to the
house, and to wash his hands with good cleansing soap; not to swear, to
speak her kind of French, to wear boots instead of shoes, cotton shirts
instead of sacking, and to brush up his hair instead of plastering
it flat. During the preceding week Elisabeth had finally succeeded in
persuading Falleix to give up wearing a pair of enormous flat earrings
resembling hoops.

"You go too far, Madame Baudoyer," he said, seeing her satisfaction at
the final sacrifice; "you order me about too much. You make me clean my
teeth, which loosens them; presently you will want me to brush my nails
and curl my hair, which won't do at all in our business; we don't like
dandies."

Elisabeth Baudoyer, nee Saillard, is one of those persons who escape
portraiture through their utter commonness; yet who ought to be
sketched, because they are specimens of that second-rate Parisian
bourgeoisie which occupies a place above the well-to-do artisan and
below the upper middle classes,--a tribe whose virtues are well-nigh
vices, whose defects are never kindly, but whose habits and manners,
dull and insipid though they be, are not without a certain originality.
Something pinched and puny about Elisabeth Saillard was painful to the
eye. Her figure, scarcely over four feet in