il
heroically. Two thousand placards were pasted in three days on the most
conspicuous spots in all Paris. No one could avoid coming face to face
with Cephalic Oil, and reading a pithy sentence, constructed by Finot,
which announced the impossibility of forcing the hair to grow and the
dangers of dyeing it, and was judiciously accompanied by a quotation
from Vauquelin's report to the Academy of Sciences,--in short, a
regular certificate of life for dead hair, offered to all those who
used Cephalic Oil. Every hair-dresser in Paris, and all the perfumers,
ornamented their doorways with gilt frames containing a fine impression
of the prospectus on vellum, at the top of which shone the engraving of
Hero and Leander, reduced in size, with the following assertion as an
epigraph: "The peoples of antiquity preserved their hair by the use of
Cephalic Oil."

"He has devised frames, permanent frames, perpetual placards,"
said Birotteau to himself, quite dumbfounded as he stood before the
shop-front of the Cloche d'Argent.

"Then you have not seen," said his daughter, "the frame which Monsieur
Anselme has brought with his own hands, sending Celestin three hundred
bottles of oil?"

"No," he said.

"Celestin has already sold fifty to passers-by, and sixty to regular
customers."

"Ah!" exclaimed Cesar.

The poor man, bewildered by the clash of bells which misery jangles in
the ears of its victims, lived and moved in a dazed condition. The night
before, Popinot had waited more than an hour to see him, and went away
after talking with Constance and Cesarine, who told him that Cesar was
absorbed in his great enterprise.

"Ah, true! the lands about the Madeleine."

Happily, Popinot--who for a month had never left the Rue des
Cinq-Diamants, sitting up all night, and working all Sunday at the
manufactory--had seen neither the Ragons, nor Pillerault, nor his uncle
the judge. He allowed himself but two hours' sleep, poor lad! he had
only two clerks, but at the rate things were now going, he would soon
need four. In business, opportunity is everything. He who does not
spring upon the back of success and clutch it by the mane, lets fortune
escape. Popinot felt that his suit would prosper if six months hence he
could say to his uncle and aunt, "I am secure; my fortune is made," and
carry to Birotteau thirty or forty thousand francs as his share of
the profits. He was ignorant of Roguin's flight, of the disasters and
embarrassments wh