honest woman, a good mother of a family, and looked at life according
to the religious programme of the middle classes. Such a career suited
her own ideas far better than the dangerous vanities which seduce so
many youthful Parisian imaginations. Constance, with her narrow
intelligence, was a type of the petty bourgeoisie whose labors are not
performed without grumbling; who begin by refusing what they desire,
and end by getting angry when taken at their word; whose restless
activity is carried into the kitchen and into the counting-room, into
the gravest matters of business, and into the invisible darns of the
household linen; who love while scolding, who conceive no ideas but
the simplest (the small change of the mind); who argue about
everything, fear everything, calculate everything, and fret
perpetually over the future. Her cold but ingenuous beauty, her
touching expression, her freshness and purity, prevented Birotteau
from thinking of her defects, which moreover were more than
compensated by a delicate sense of honor natural to women, by an
excessive love of order, by a fanaticism for work, and by her genius
as a saleswoman. Constance was eighteen years old, and possessed
eleven thousand francs of her own. Cesar, inspired by his love with an
excessive ambition, bought the business of "The Queen of Roses" and
removed it to a handsome building near the Place Vendome. At the early
age of twenty-one, married to a woman he adored, the proprietor of an
establishment for which he had paid three quarters of the price down,
he had the right to view, and did view, the future in glowing colors;
all the more when he measured the path which led from his original
point of departure. Roguin, notary of Ragon, who had drawn up the
marriage contract, gave the new perfumer some sound advice, and
prevented him from paying the whole purchase money down with the
fortune of his wife.