ade him hate a system
of government which was capable of shedding blood without repugnance.
His commercial interests showed him the death of trade in the Maximum,
and in political convulsions, which are always destructive of business.
Moreover, like a true perfumer, he hated the revolution which made a
Titus of every man and abolished powder. The tranquillity resulting
from absolutism could alone, he thought, give life to money, and he grew
bigoted on behalf of royalty. When Monsieur Ragon saw that Cesar was
well-disposed on this point, he made him head-clerk and initiated him
into the secrets of "The Queen of Roses," several of whose customers
were the most active and devoted emissaries of the Bourbons, and where
the correspondence between Paris and the West secretly went on. Carried
away by the fervor of youth, electrified by his intercourse with the
Georges, the Billardiere, Montauran, Bauvan, Longuy, Manda, Bernier, du
Guenic, and the Fontaines, Cesar flung himself into the conspiracy by
which the royalists and the terrorists combined on the 13th Vendemiaire
against the expiring Convention.

On that day Cesar had the honor of fighting against Napoleon on the
steps of Saint-Roch, and was wounded at the beginning of the affair.
Every one knows the result of that attempt. If the aide-de-camp of
Barras then issued from his obscurity, the obscurity of Birotteau saved
the clerk's life. A few friends carried the belligerent perfumer to
"The Queen of Roses," where he remained hidden in the garret, nursed by
Madame Ragon, and happily forgotten. Cesar Birotteau never had but that
one spurt of martial courage. During the month his convalescence lasted,
he made solid reflections on the absurdity of an alliance between
politics and perfumery. Although he remained royalist, he resolved to
be, purely and simply, a royalist perfumer, and never more to compromise
himself, body and soul, for his country.

On the 18th Brumaire, Monsieur and Madame Ragon, despairing of the royal
cause, determined to give up perfumery, and live like honest bourgeois
without meddling in politics. To recover the value of their business, it
was necessary to find a man who had more integrity than ambition,
more plain good sense than ability. Ragon proposed the affair to his
head-clerk. Birotteau, now master at twenty years of age of a thousand
francs a year from the public Funds, hesitated. His ambition was to
live near Chinon as soon as he could get toget