interior is restored, the Auvergnat relinquishes velveteen and jackets for a great-coat, and there he sits like a dragon guarding his treasure, surrounded by masterpieces!  He is a cunning connoisseur by this time; he has increased his capital tenfold; he is not to be cheated; he knows the tricks of the trade.  The monster among his treasures looks like some old hag among a score of young girls that she offers to the public.  Beauty and miracles of art are alike indifferent to him; subtle and dense as he is, he has a keen eye to profits, he talks roughly to those who know less than he does; he has learned to act a part, he pretends to love his pictures, or again he lets you know the price he himself gave for the things, he offers to let you see the memoranda of the sale.  He is a Proteus; in one hour he can be Jocrisse, Janot, Queue-rouge, Mondor, Hapagon, or Nicodeme.

The third year found armor, and old pictures, and some tolerably fine clocks in Remonencq’s shop.  He sent for his sister, and La Remonencq came on foot all the way from Auvergne to take charge of the shop while her brother was away.  A big and very ugly woman, dressed like a Japanese idol, a half-idiotic creature with a vague, staring gaze she would not bate a centime of the prices fixed by her brother.  In the intervals of business she did the work of the house, and solved the apparently insoluble problem—­how to live on “the mists of the Seine.”  The Remonencqs’ diet consisted of bread and herrings, with the outside leaves of lettuce or vegetable refuse selected from the heaps deposited in the kennel before the doors of eating-houses.  The two between them did not spend more than fivepence a day on food (bread included), and La Remonencq earned the money by sewing or spinning.

Remonencq came to Paris in the first instance to work as an errand-boy.  Between the years 1825 and 1831 he ran errands for dealers in curiosities in the Boulevard Beaumarchais or coppersmiths in the Rue de Lappe.  It is the usual start in life in his line of business.  Jews, Normans, Auvergnats, and Savoyards, those four different races of men all have the same instincts, and make their fortunes in the same way; they spend nothing, make small profits, and let them accumulate at compound interest.  Such is their trading charter, and that charter is no delusion.

Remonencq at this moment had made it up with his old master Monistrol; he did business with wholesale dealers, he was a chineur (the technical word), plying his trade in the banlieue, which, as everybody knows, extends for some forty leagues round Paris.

After fourteen years of business, he had sixty thousand francs in hand and a well-stocked shop.  He lived in the Rue de Normandie because the rent was low, but casual customers were scarce, most of his goods were sold to other dealers, and he was content with moderate gains.  All his business transactions were carried on in the Auvergue dialect or charabia, as people call it.