refect wished to nominate Birotteau as
mayor. Thanks to his wife, the perfumer would only accept the place of
deputy-mayor, which brought him less before the public. Such modesty
increased the respect generally felt for him, and won him the friendship
of the new mayor, Monsieur Flamet de la Billardiere. Birotteau, who
had seen him in the shop in the days when "The Queen of Roses" was the
headquarters of royalist conspiracy, mentioned him to the prefect of
the Seine when that official consulted Cesar on the choice to be made.
Monsieur and Madame Birotteau were therefore never forgotten in the
invitations of the mayor. Madame Birotteau frequently took up the
collections at Saint-Roch in the best of good company. La Billardiere
warmly supported Birotteau when the question of bestowing the crosses
given to the municipality came up, and dwelt upon his wound at
Saint-Roch, his attachment to the Bourbons, and the respect which he
enjoyed. The government, wishing on the one hand to cheapen Napoleon's
order by lavishing the cross of the Legion of honor, and on the other
to win adherents and rally to the Bourbons the various trades and men
of arts and sciences, included Birotteau in the coming promotion.
This honor, which suited well with the show that Cesar made in
his arrondissement, put him in a position where the ideas of a man
accustomed to succeed naturally enlarged themselves. The news which the
mayor had just given him of his preferment was the determining reason
that decided him to plunge into the scheme which he now for the first
time revealed to his wife; he believed it would enable him to give up
perfumery all the more quickly, and rise into the regions of the higher
bourgeoisie of Paris.

Cesar was now forty years old. The work he had undertaken in his
manufactories had given him a few premature wrinkles, and had slightly
silvered the thick tufts of hair on which the pressure of his hat left a
shining circle. His forehead, where the hair grew in a way to mark five
distinct points, showed the simplicity of his life. The heavy eyebrows
were not alarming because the limpid glance of his frank blue eyes
harmonized with the open forehead of an honest man. His nose, broken at
the bridge and thick at the end, gave him the wondering look of a gaby
in the streets of Paris. His lips were very thick, and his large chin
fell in a straight line below them. His face, high-colored and square
in outline, revealed, by the lines of it