erfumer, catching sight of the young man, with whom he had made an
appointment at Monsieur de la Billardiere's the night before.

"Contrary to the custom of men of talent you are punctual, monsieur,"
said Cesar, displaying his finest commercial graces. "If punctuality,
in the words of our king,--a man of wit as well as a statesman,--is the
politeness of princes, it is also the wealth of merchants. Time, time
is gold, especially to you artists. I permit myself to say to you that
architecture is the union of all the arts. We will not enter through the
shop," he added, opening the private door of his house.

Four years earlier Monsieur Grindot had carried off the _grand prix_ in
architecture, and had lately returned from Rome where he had spent three
years at the cost of the State. In Italy the young man had dreamed
of art; in Paris he thought of fortune. Government alone can pay the
needful millions to raise an architect to glory; it is therefore natural
that every ambitious youth of that calling, returning from Rome
and thinking himself a Fontaine or a Percier, should bow before the
administration. The liberal student became a royalist, and sought to win
the favor of influential persons. When a _grand prix_ man behaves thus,
his comrades call him a trimmer. The young architect in question had two
ways open to him,--either to serve the perfumer well, or put him under
contribution. Birotteau the deputy-mayor, Birotteau the future possessor
of half the lands about the Madeleine, where he would sooner or later
build up a fine neighborhood, was a man to keep on good terms with.
Grindot accordingly resolved to sacrifice his immediate gains to his
future interests. He listened patiently to the plans, the repetitions,
and the ideas of this worthy specimen of the bourgeois class, the
constant butt of the witty shafts and ridicule of artists, and the
object of their everlasting contempt, nodding his head as if to show the
perfumer that he caught his ideas. When Cesar had thoroughly explained
everything, the young man proceeded to sum up for him his own plan.

"You have now three front windows on the first floor, besides the window
on the staircase which lights the landing; to these four windows you
mean to add two on the same level in the next house, by turning the
staircase, so as to open a way from one house to the other on the street
side."

"You have understood me perfectly," said the perfumer, surprised.

"To carry out yo