reached that point. Everything at "The Queen of Roses" now rested on
the head-clerk; he had not a moment to give to pleasure. In such a
life wants become imperious, and a chance meeting with a beautiful
young woman, of whom a libertine clerk would scarcely have dreamed,
produced on Cesar an overpowering effect. On a fine June day, crossing
by the Pont-Marie to the Ile Saint-Louis, he saw a young girl standing
at the door of a shop at the angle of the Quai d'Anjou. Constance
Pillerault was the forewoman of a linen-draper's establishment called
Le Petit Matelot,--the first of those shops which have since been
established in Paris with more or less of painted signs, floating
banners, show-cases filled with swinging shawls, cravats arranged like
houses of cards, and a thousand other commercial seductions, such as
fixed prices, fillets of suspended objects, placards, illusions and
optical effects carried to such a degree of perfection that a
shop-front has now become a commercial poem. The low price of all the
articles called "Novelties" which were to be found at the
Petit-Matelot gave the shop an unheard of vogue, and that in a part of
Paris which was the least favorable to fashion and commerce. The young
forewoman was at this time cited for her beauty, as was the case in
later days with the beautiful lemonade-girl of the cafe of the Milles
Colonnnes, and several other poor creatures who flattened more noses,
young and old, against the window-panes of milliners, confectioners,
and linen-drapers, than there are stones in the streets of Paris.

The head-clerk of "The Queen of Roses," living between Saint-Roch and
the Rue de la Sourdiere, knew nothing of the existence of the
Petit-Matelot; for the smaller trades of Paris are more or less
strangers to each other. Cesar was so vigorously smitten by the beauty
of Constance that he rushed furiously into the shop to buy six linen
shirts, disputing the price a long time, and requiring volumes of linen