anecdotes with which husband and wife exalted the memory of the queen,
fired the imagination of the young man. The horrible fate of those two
crowned heads, decapitated a few steps from the shop-door, roused his
feeling heart and made him hate a system of government which was
capable of shedding blood without repugnance. His commercial interests
showed him the death of trade in the Maximum, and in political
convulsions, which are always destructive of business. Moreover, like
a true perfumer, he hated the revolution which made a Titus of every
man and abolished powder. The tranquillity resulting from absolutism
could alone, he thought, give life to money, and he grew bigoted on
behalf of royalty. When Monsieur Ragon saw that Cesar was well-disposed
on this point, he made him head-clerk and initiated him into the
secrets of "The Queen of Roses," several of whose customers were the
most active and devoted emissaries of the Bourbons, and where the
correspondence between Paris and the West secretly went on. Carried
away by the fervor of youth, electrified by his intercourse with the
Georges, the Billardiere, Montauran, Bauvan, Longuy, Manda, Bernier,
du Guenic, and the Fontaines, Cesar flung himself into the conspiracy
by which the royalists and the terrorists combined on the 13th
Vendemiaire against the expiring Convention.

On that day Cesar had the honor of fighting against Napoleon on the
steps of Saint-Roch, and was wounded at the beginning of the affair.
Every one knows the result of that attempt. If the aide-de-camp of
Barras then issued from his obscurity, the obscurity of Birotteau
saved the clerk's life. A few friends carried the belligerent perfumer
to "The Queen of Roses," where he remained hidden in the garret,
nursed by Madame Ragon, and happily forgotten. Cesar Birotteau never
had but that one spurt of martial courage. During the month his
convalescence lasted, he made solid reflections on the absurdity of an