firm of Brezac, collectors of metals and other relics from all chateaux in the provinces.  About twenty-seven years of age, and spoiled, like others, by success, Martin Falleix had had the luck to become the active agent of Monsieur Saillard, the sleeping-partner in the working out of a discovery made by Falleix in smelting (patent of invention and gold medal granted at the exposition of 1825).  Madame Baudoyer, whose only daughter was treading—­to use an expression of old Saillard’s—­on the tail of her twelve years, laid claim to Falleix, a thickset, swarthy, active young fellow, of shrewd principles, whose education she was superintending.  The said education, according to her ideas, consisted in teaching him to play boston, to hold his cards properly, and not to let others see his game; to shave himself regularly before he came to the house, and to wash his hands with good cleansing soap; not to swear, to speak her kind of French, to wear boots instead of shoes, cotton shirts instead of sacking, and to brush up his hair instead of plastering it flat.  During the preceding week Elisabeth had finally succeeded in persuading Falleix to give up wearing a pair of enormous flat earrings resembling hoops.

“You go too far, Madame Baudoyer,” he said, seeing her satisfaction at the final sacrifice; “you order me about too much.  You make me clean my teeth, which loosens them; presently you will want me to brush my nails and curl my hair, which won’t do at all in our business; we don’t like dandies.”

Elisabeth Baudoyer, nee Saillard, is one of those persons who escape portraiture through their utter commonness; yet who ought to be sketched, because they are specimens of that second-rate Parisian bourgeoisie which occupies a place above the well-to-do artisan and below the upper middle classes,—­a tribe whose virtues are well-nigh vices, whose defects are never kindly, but whose habits and manners, dull and insipid though they be, are not without a certain originality.  Something pinched and puny about Elisabeth Saillard was painful to the eye.  Her figure, scarcely over four feet in height, was so thin that the waist measured less than twenty inches.  Her small features, which clustered close about the nose, gave her face a vague resemblance to a weasel’s snout.  Though she was past thirty years old she looked scarcely more than sixteen.  Her eyes, of porcelain blue, overweighted by heavy eyelids which fell nearly straight from the arch of the eyebrows, had little light in them.  Everything about her appearance was commonplace:  witness her flaxen hair, tending to whiteness; her flat forehead, from which the light did not reflect; and her dull complexion, with gray, almost leaden, tones.  The lower part of the face, more triangular than oval, ended irregularly the otherwise irregular outline of her face.  Her voice had a rather pretty range of intonation, from sharp to sweet.  Elisabeth was a perfect specimen of the second-rate little bourgeoisie who