pitilessly. Two years later, the cook happily abandoned Cesar for a
young recruit belonging to her native place who was then hiding in
Paris,--a lad twenty years old, owning a few acres of land, who let
Ursula marry him.

During those two years the cook had fed her little Cesar well, and had
explained to him certain mysteries of Parisian life, which she made
him look at from the bottom; and she impressed upon him, out of
jealousy, a profound horror of evil places, whose dangers seemed not
unknown to her. In 1792 the feet of the deserted Cesar were
well-toughened to the pavements, his shoulders to the bales, and his
mind to what he called the "humbugs" of Paris. So when Ursula
abandoned him he was speedily consoled, for she had realized none of
his instinctive ideas in relation to sentiment. Licentious and surly,
wheedling and pilfering, selfish and a tippler, she clashed with the
simple nature of Birotteau without offering him any compensating
perspective. Sometimes the poor lad felt with pain that he was bound
by ties that are strong enough to hold ingenuous hearts to a creature
with whom he could not sympathize. By the time that he became master
of his own heart he had reached his growth, and was sixteen years old.
His mind, developed by Ursula and by the banter of the clerks, made
him study commerce with an eye in which intelligence was veiled
beneath simplicity: he observed the customers; asked in leisure
moments for explanations about the merchandise, whose divers sorts and
proper places he 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