retained in his head. The day came
when he knew all the articles, and their prices and marks, better than
any new-comer; and from that time Monsieur and Madame Ragon made a
practice of employing him in the business.

When the terrible levy of the year II. made a clean sweep in the shop of
citizen Ragon, Cesar Birotteau, promoted to be second clerk, profited
by the occasion to obtain a salary of fifty francs a month, and took
his seat at the dinner-table of the Ragons with ineffable delight. The
second clerk of "The Queen of Roses," possessing already six hundred
francs, now had a chamber where he could put away, in long-coveted
articles of furniture, the clothing he had little by little got
together. Dressed like other young men of an epoch when fashion required
the assumption of boorish manners, the gentle and modest peasant had
an air and manner which rendered him at least their equal; and he thus
passed the barriers which in other times ordinary life would have placed
between himself and the bourgeoisie. Towards the end of this year his
integrity won him a place in the counting-room. The dignified citoyenne
Ragon herself looked after his linen, and the two shopkeepers became
familiar with him.

In Vendemiaire, 1794, Cesar, who possessed a hundred louis d'or, changed
them for six thousand francs in assignats, with which he bought into the
Funds at thirty, paying for the investment on the very day before the
paper began its course of depreciation at the Bourse, and locking up
his securities with unspeakable satisfaction. From that day forward he
watched the movement of stocks and public affairs with secret anxieties
of his own, which made him quiver at each rumor of the reverses or
successes that marked this period of our history. Monsieur Ragon,
formerly perfumer to her majesty Queen Marie-Antoinette, confided to
Cesar Birotteau, during this critical period, his attachment to the
fallen tyrants. This disclosure was one of the cardinal events in
Cesar's life. The nightly conversations when the shop was closed, the
street quiet, the accounts regulated, made a fanatic of the Tourangian,
who in becoming a royalist obeyed an inborn instinct. The recital of the
virtuous deeds of Louis XVI., the anecdotes with which husband and wife
exalted the memory of the queen, fired the imagination of the young man.
The horrible fate of those two crowned heads, decapitated a few steps
from the shop-door, roused his feeling heart and m