of citizen Ragon, Cesar Birotteau, promoted to be second clerk,
profited by the occasion to obtain a salary of fifty francs a month,
and took his seat at the dinner-table of the Ragons with ineffable
delight. The second clerk of "The Queen of Roses," possessing already
six hundred francs, now had a chamber where he could put away, in
long-coveted articles of furniture, the clothing he had little by
little got together. Dressed like other young men of an epoch when
fashion required the assumption of boorish manners, the gentle and
modest peasant had an air and manner which rendered him at least their
equal; and he thus passed the barriers which in other times ordinary
life would have placed between himself and the bourgeoisie. Towards
the end of this year his integrity won him a place in the
counting-room. The dignified citoyenne Ragon herself looked after his
linen, and the two shopkeepers became familiar with him.

In Vendemiaire, 1794, Cesar, who possessed a hundred louis d'or,
changed them for six thousand francs in assignats, with which he
bought into the Funds at thirty, paying for the investment on the very
day before the paper began its course of depreciation at the Bourse,
and locking up his securities with unspeakable satisfaction. From that
day forward he watched the movement of stocks and public affairs with
secret anxieties of his own, which made him quiver at each rumor of
the reverses or successes that marked this period of our history.
Monsieur Ragon, formerly perfumer to her majesty Queen
Marie-Antoinette, confided to Cesar Birotteau, during this critical
period, his attachment to the fallen tyrants. This disclosure was one
of the cardinal events in Cesar's life. The nightly conversations when
the shop was closed, the street quiet, the accounts regulated, made a
fanatic of the Tourangian, who in becoming a royalist obeyed an inborn
instinct. The recital of the virtuous deeds of Louis XVI., the