with its gilded salons and great opulence, where many political celebrities of the “juste milieu” were wont to congregate, such as Monsieur Popinot, who became, after a time, minister of commerce; Cochin, since made Baron Cochin, a former employee at the ministry of finance, who, having a large interest in the drug business, was now the oracle of the Lombard and Bourdonnais quarters, conjointly with Monsieur Anselme Popinot.  Minard’s eldest son, a lawyer, aiming to succeed those barristers who were turned down from the Palais for political reasons in 1830, was the genius of the household, and his mother, even more than his father, aspired to marry him well.  Zelie Minard, formerly a flower-maker, felt an ardent passion for the upper social spheres, and desired to enter them through the marriages of her son and daughter; whereas Minard, wiser than she, and imbued with the vigor of the middle classes, which the revolution of July had infiltrated into the fibres of government, thought only of wealth and fortune.

He frequented the Thuillier salon to gain information as to Celeste’s probable inheritance.  He knew, like Dutocq and Phellion, the reports occasioned by Thuillier’s former intimacy with Flavie, and he saw at a glance the idolatry of the Thuilliers for their godchild.  Dutocq, to gain admittance to Minard’s house, fawned upon him grossly.  When Minard, the Rothschild of the arrondissement, appeared at the Thuilliers’, he compared him cleverly to Napoleon, finding him stout, fat, and blooming, having left him at the ministry thin, pale, and puny.

“You looked, in the division Billardiere,” he said, “like Napoleon before the 18th Brumaire, and I behold you now the Napoleon of the Empire.”

Notwithstanding which flattery, Minard received Dutocq very coldly and did not invite him to his house; consequently, he made a mortal enemy of the former clerk.

Monsieur and Madame Phellion, worthy as they were, could not keep themselves from making calculations and cherishing hopes; they thought that Celeste would be the very wife for their son the professor; therefore, to have, as it were, a watcher in the Thuillier salon, they introduced their son-in-law, Monsieur Barniol, a man much respected in the faubourg Saint-Jacques, and also an old employee at the mayor’s office, an intimate friend of theirs, named Laudigeois.  Thus the Phellions formed a phalanx of seven persons; the Collevilles were not less numerous; so that on Sundays it often appeared that thirty persons were assembled in the Thuillier salon.  Thuillier renewed acquaintance with the Saillards, Baudoyers, and Falleixs,—­all persons of respectability in the quarter of the Palais-Royal, whom they often invited to dinner.