ho argue about everything, fear
everything, calculate everything, and fret perpetually over the future.
Her cold but ingenuous beauty, her touching expression, her freshness
and purity, prevented Birotteau from thinking of her defects, which
moreover were more than compensated by a delicate sense of honor natural
to women, by an excessive love of order, by a fanaticism for work, and
by her genius as a saleswoman. Constance was eighteen years old, and
possessed eleven thousand francs of her own. Cesar, inspired by his love
with an excessive ambition, bought the business of "The Queen of Roses"
and removed it to a handsome building near the Place Vendome. At the
early age of twenty-one, married to a woman he adored, the proprietor of
an establishment for which he had paid three quarters of the price down,
he had the right to view, and did view, the future in glowing colors;
all the more when he measured the path which led from his original point
of departure. Roguin, notary of Ragon, who had drawn up the marriage
contract, gave the new perfumer some sound advice, and prevented him
from paying the whole purchase money down with the fortune of his wife.

"Keep the means of undertaking some good enterprise, my lad," he had
said to him.

Birotteau looked up to the notary with admiration, fell into the habit
of consulting him, and made him his friend. Like Ragon and Pillerault,
he had so much faith in the profession that he gave himself up to Roguin
without allowing himself a suspicion. Thanks to this advice, Cesar,
supplied with the eleven thousand francs of his wife for his start in
business, would have scorned to exchange his possessions for those of
the First Consul, brilliant as the prospects of Napoleon might seem. At
first the Birotteaus kept only a cook, and lived in the _entresol_ above
the shop,--a sort of den tolerably well decorated by an upholsterer,
where the bride and bridegroom began a honeymoon that was never to end.
Madame Cesar appeared to advantage behind the counter. Her celebrated
beauty had an enormous influence upon the sales, and the beautiful
Madame Birotteau became a topic among the fashionable young men of
the Empire. If Cesar was sometimes accused of royalism, the world did
justice to his honesty; if a few neighboring shopkeepers envied his
happiness, every one at least thought him worthy of it. The bullet which
struck him on the steps of Saint-Roch gave him the reputation of
being mixed up with p