in had already pushed its entree and sortie up through the
soil, not a hundred metres from his door, where they stood like
atrocious yellow tulips, art nouveau, breathing people out and in by
thousands. There was no lack of possible custom. The problem was to turn
possible into probable, and probable into permanent; and here the seven
wits and the ten thousand francs of Esperance came prominently to the
fore. She it was who sounded the progressive note, which is half the
secret of success.

"Pour attirer les gens," she said, with her arms akimbo, "il faut
d'abord les epater."

In her creed all that was worth doing at all was worth doing gloriously.
So, under her guidance, Hippolyte journeyed from shop to shop in the
faubourg St. Antoine, and spent hours of impassioned argument with
carpenters and decorators. In the end, the salle de coiffure was
glorified by fresh paint without and within, and by the addition of a
long mirror in a gilt frame, and a complicated apparatus of gleaming
nickel-plate, which went by the imposing title of appareil antiseptique,
and the acquisition of which was duly proclaimed by a special placard
that swung at right angles to the door. The shop was rechristened, too,
and the black and white sign across its front which formerly bore the
simple inscription "Kilbert, Coiffeur," now blazoned abroad the vastly
more impressive legend "Salon Malakoff." The window shelves fairly
groaned beneath their burden of soaps, toilet waters, and perfumery, a
string of bright yellow sponges occupied each corner of the window,
and, through the agency of white enamel letters on the pane itself,
public attention was drawn to the apparently contradictory facts that
English was spoken and "schampoing" given within. Then Hippolyte engaged
two assistants, and clad them in white duck jackets, and his wife
fabricated a new blouse of blue silk, and seated herself behind the desk
with an engaging smile. The enterprise was fairly launched, and
experience was not slow in proving the theories of Esperance to be well
founded. The quartier was epate from the start, and took with enthusiasm
the bait held forth. The affairs of the Salon Malakoff prospered
prodigiously.

But there is a serpent in every Eden, and in that of the Sergeot this
role was assumed by Alexandrine Caille. The worthy epicier himself was
of too torpid a temperament to fall a victim to the gnawing tooth of
envy, but in the soul of his wife the launch, and, w