This act of Robespierre led to one good result:  the terrified grocers let politics alone until 1830.  Descoings’s shop was not a hundred yards from Robespierre’s lodging.  His successor was scarcely more fortunate than himself.  Cesar Birotteau, the celebrated perfumer of the “Queen of Roses,” bought the premises; but, as if the scaffold had left some inexplicable contagion behind it, the inventor of the “Paste of Sultans” and the “Carminative Balm” came to his ruin in that very shop.  The solution of the problem here suggested belongs to the realm of occult science.

During the visits which Roland’s secretary paid to the unfortunate Madame Descoings, he was struck with the cold, calm, innocent beauty of Agathe Rouget.  While consoling the widow, who, however, was too inconsolable to carry on the business of her second deceased husband, he married the charming girl, with the consent of her father, who hastened to give his approval to the match.  Doctor Rouget, delighted to hear that matters were going beyond his expectations,—­for his wife, on the death of her brother, had become sole heiress of the Descoings,—­rushed to Paris, not so much to be present at the wedding as to see that the marriage contract was drawn to suit him.  The ardent and disinterested love of citizen Bridau gave carte blanche to the perfidious doctor, who made the most of his son-in-law’s blindness, as the following history will show.

Madame Rouget, or, to speak more correctly, the doctor, inherited all the property, landed and personal, of Monsieur and Madame Descoings the elder, who died within two years of each other; and soon after that, Rouget got the better, as we may say, of his wife, for she died at the beginning of the year 1799.  So he had vineyards and he bought farms, he owned iron-works and he sold fleeces.  His well-beloved son was stupidly incapable of doing anything; but the father destined him for the state in life of a land proprietor and allowed him to grow up in wealth and silliness, certain that the lad would know as much as the wisest if he simply let himself live and die.  After 1799, the cipherers of Issoudun put, at the very least, thirty thousand francs’ income to the doctor’s credit.  From the time of his wife’s death he led a debauched life, though he regulated it, so to speak, and kept it within the closed doors of his own house.  This man, endowed with “strength of character,” died in 1805, and God only knows what the townspeople of Issoudun said about him then, and how many anecdotes they related of his horrible private life.  Jean-Jacques Rouget, whom his father, recognizing his stupidity, had latterly treated with severity, remained a bachelor for certain reasons, the explanation of which will form an important part of this history.  His celibacy was partly his father’s fault, as we shall see later.

Meantime, it is well to inquire into the results of the secret vengeance the doctor took on a daughter whom he did not recognize as his own, but who, you must understand at once, was legitimately his.  Not a person in Issoudun had noticed one of those capricious facts that make the whole subject of generation a vast abyss in which science flounders.  Agathe bore a strong likeness to the mother of Doctor Rouget.  Just as gout is said to skip a generation and pass from grandfather to grandson, resemblances not uncommonly follow the same course.