“If I do not meet a soldier coming home from Saint-Roch, my request will be granted.  That will be God’s answer,” he said to himself, after praying that God would help him.

And he was overjoyed when it happened that he did not meet a soldier.  Still, his heart was so heavy that he needed another heart on which to lean and moan.  Cesarine, to whom from the first he confided the fatal truth, knew all his secrets.  Many stolen glances passed between them, glances of despair or smothered hope,—­interpellations of the eye darted with mutual eagerness, inquiries and replies full of sympathy, rays passing from soul to soul.  Birotteau compelled himself to seem gay, even jovial, with his wife.  If Constance asked a question—­bah! everything was going well; Popinot (about whom Cesar knew nothing) was succeeding; the oil was looking up; the notes with Claparon would be paid; there was nothing to fear.  His mock joy was terrible to witness.  When his wife had fallen asleep in the sumptuous bed, Birotteau would rise to a sitting position and think over his troubles.  Cesarine would sometimes creep in with her bare feet, in her chemise, and a shawl over her white shoulders.

“Papa, I hear you,—­you are crying,” she would say, crying herself.

Birotteau sank into such a torpor, after writing the letter which asked for an interview with the great Francois Keller, that his daughter took him out for a walk through the streets of Paris.  For the first time he was roused to notice enormous scarlet placards on all the walls, and his eyes encountered the words “Cephalic Oil.”

While catastrophes thus threatened “The Queen of Roses” to westward, the house of A. Popinot was rising, radiant in the eastern splendors of success.  By the advice of Gaudissart and Finot, Anselme launched his oil heroically.  Two thousand placards were pasted in three days on the most conspicuous spots in all Paris.  No one could avoid coming face to face with Cephalic Oil, and reading a pithy sentence, constructed by Finot, which announced the impossibility of forcing the hair to grow and the dangers of dyeing it, and was judiciously accompanied by a quotation from Vauquelin’s report to the Academy of Sciences,—­in short, a regular certificate of life for dead hair, offered to all those who used Cephalic Oil.  Every hair-dresser in Paris, and all the perfumers, ornamented their doorways with gilt frames containing a fine impression of the prospectus on vellum, at the top of which shone the engraving of Hero and Leander, reduced in size, with the following assertion as an epigraph:  “The peoples of antiquity preserved their hair by the use of Cephalic Oil.”

“He has devised frames, permanent frames, perpetual placards,” said Birotteau to himself, quite dumbfounded as he stood before the shop-front of the Cloche d’Argent.

“Then you have not seen,” said his daughter, “the frame which Monsieur Anselme has brought with his own hands, sending Celestin three hundred bottles of oil?”