considered money when it was a question of giving pleasure to their
child, from whom they had never been willing to separate. Imagine the
happiness of the poor parvenu peasant as he listened to his charming
Cesarine playing a sonata of Steibelt's on the piano, and singing a
ballad; or when he found her writing the French language correctly, or
reading Racine, father and son, and explaining their beauties, or
sketching a landscape, or painting in sepia! What joy to live again in
a flower so pure, so lovely, which had never left the maternal stem;
an angel whose budding graces and whose earliest developments he had
passionately watched; an only daughter, incapable of despising her
father, or of ridiculing his defective education, so truly was she an
ingenuous young girl.

When he first came to Paris, Cesar had known how to read, write, and
cipher, but his education stopped there; his laborious life had kept
him from acquiring ideas and knowledge outside the business of
perfumery. Mixing wholly with people to whom science and letters were
of no importance, and whose information did not go beyond their
specialty, having no time to give to higher studies, the perfumer had
become a merely practical man. He adopted necessarily the language,
blunders, and opinions of the bourgeois of Paris, who admires Moliere,
Voltaire, and Rousseau on faith, and buys their books without ever
reading them; who maintains that people should say _ormoires_, because
women put away their gold and their dresses and moire in those
articles of furniture, and that it is only a corruption of the
language to say _armoires_. Potier, Talma, and Mademoiselle Mars were
ten times millionaires, and did not live like other human beings; the
great tragedian ate raw meat, and Mademoiselle Mars sometimes drank
dissolved pearls, in imitation of a celebrated Egyptian actress. The
Emperor had leather pockets in his waistcoat, so that he could take