The Baron de Thaller was too practical a man to live in the same house, or even in the same district, where his offices were located.  To dwell in the midst of his business; to be constantly subjected to the contact of his employes, to the unkindly comments of a crowd of subordinates; to expose himself to hourly annoyances, to sickening solicitations, to the reclamations and eternal complaints of his stockholders and his clients!  Pouah!  He’d have given up the business first.  And so, on the very days when he had established the offices of the Mutual Credit in the Rue de Quatre-Septembre, he had purchased a house in the Rue de la Pepiniere within a step of the Faubourg St. Honore.

It was a brand-new house, which had never yet been occupied, and which had just been erected by a contractor who was almost celebrated, towards 1866, at the moment of the great transformations of Paris, when whole blocks were leveled to the ground, and rose again so rapidly, that one might well wonder whether the masons, instead of a trowel, did not make use of a magician’s wand.

This contractor, named Parcimieux, had come from the Limousin in 1860 with his carpenter’s tools for all fortune, and, in less than six years, had accumulated, at the lowest estimate, six millions of francs.  Only he was a modest man, and took as much pains to conceal his fortune, and offend no one, as most parvenus do to display their wealth, and insult the public.

Though he could hardly sign his name, yet he knew and practised the maxim of the Greek philosopher, which is, perhaps, the true secret of happiness,—­hide thy life.  And there were no expedients to which he did not resort to hide it.  At the time of his greatest prosperity, for instance, having need of a carriage, he had applied to the manager of the Petites Voitures Company, and had had built for himself two cabs, outwardly similar in every respect to those used by the company, but within, most luxuriously upholstered, and drawn by horses of common appearance, but who could go their twenty-five miles in two hours any day.  And these he had hired by the year.

Having his carriage, the worthy builder determined to have, also, his house, his own house, built by himself.  But this required infinitely greater precautions still.

“For, as you may imagine,” he explained to his friends, “a man does not make as much money as I have, without also making many cruel, bitter, and irreconcilable enemies.  I have against me all the builders who have not succeeded, all the sub-contractors I employ, and who say that I speculate on their poverty, and the thousands of workmen who work for me, and swear that I grind them down to the dust.  Already they call me brigand, slaver, thief, leech.  What would it be, if they saw me living in a beautiful house of my own?  They’d swear that I could not possibly have got so rich honestly, and that I must have committed some crimes.  Besides, to build me a handsome house on the street would be, in case of a mob, setting up windows for the stones of all the rascals who have been in my employment.”