alliance between politics and perfumery. Although he remained
royalist, he resolved to be, purely and simply, a royalist perfumer,
and never more to compromise himself, body and soul, for his country.

On the 18th Brumaire, Monsieur and Madame Ragon, despairing of the
royal cause, determined to give up perfumery, and live like honest
bourgeois without meddling in politics. To recover the value of their
business, it was necessary to find a man who had more integrity than
ambition, more plain good sense than ability. Ragon proposed the
affair to his head-clerk. Birotteau, now master at twenty years of age
of a thousand francs a year from the public Funds, hesitated. His
ambition was to live near Chinon as soon as he could get together an
income of fifteen hundred francs, or whenever the First Consul should
have consolidated the public debt by consolidating himself in the
Tuileries. Why should he risk his honest and simple independence in
commercial uncertainties? he asked himself. He had never expected to
win so large a fortune, and he owed it to happy chances which only
come in early youth; he intended to marry in Touraine some woman rich
enough to enable him to buy and cultivate Les Tresorieres, a little
property which, from the dawn of his reason, he had coveted, which he
dreamed of augmenting, where he could make a thousand crowns a year,
and where he would lead a life of happy obscurity. He was about to
refuse the offer, when love suddenly changed all his resolutions by
increasing tenfold the measure of his ambition.

After Ursula's desertion, Cesar had remained virtuous, as much through
fear of the dangers of Paris as from application to his work. When the
passions are without food they change their wants; marriage then
becomes, to persons of the middle class, a fixed idea, for it is their
only way of winning and appropriating a woman. Cesar Birotteau had