ase of the business with the
wife's money. "Just keep the money by you, my boy; ready money is
sometimes a handy thing in a business," he had said....

During the first year Cesar instructed his wife in all the ins and
outs of the perfumery business, which she was admirably quick to
grasp; she might have been brought into the world for that sole
purpose, so well did she adapt herself to her customers. The result of
the stock-taking at the end of the year alarmed the ambitious
perfumer. After deducting all expenses, he might perhaps hope, in
twenty years' time, to make the modest sum of a hundred thousand
francs, the price of his felicity. He determined then and there to
find some speedier road to fortune, and by way of a beginning, to be a
manufacturer as well as a retailer.

Acting against his wife's counsel, he took the lease of a shed on some
building land in the Faubourg du Temple, and painted up thereon, in
huge letters, CESAR BIROTTEAU'S FACTORY. He enticed a workman from
Grasse, and with him began to manufacture several kinds of soap,
essences, and eau-de-cologne, on the system of half profits. The
partnership only lasted six months, and ended in a loss, which he had
to sustain alone; but Birotteau did not lose heart. He meant to obtain
a result at any price, if it were only to escape a scolding from his
wife; and, indeed, he confest to her afterward that, in those days of
despair, his head used to boil like a pot on the fire, and that many a
time but for his religious principles he would have thrown himself
into the Seine.

One day, deprest by several unsuccessful experiments, he was
sauntering home to dinner along the boulevards (the lounger in Paris
is a man in despair quite as often as a genuine idler), when a book
among a hamperful at six sous apiece caught his attention; his eyes
were attracted by the yellow dusty title-page, Abdeker, so it ran, or
the Art of Preserving Beauty.

Birotteau took up the work. It claimed to be a translation from the
Arabic, but in reality it was a sort of romance written by a
physician in the previous century. Cesar happened to stumble upon a
passage there which treated of perfumes, and with his back against a
tree in the boulevard, he turned the pages over till he reached a
foot-note, wherein the learned author discoursed of the nature of the
dermis and epidermis. The writer showed conclusively that such and
such an unguent or soap often produced an effect exactly opposit