“Good-morning, my friend,” she said to him, smiling.

“I do not ask if you are comfortable here,” said Cesar, looking at Popinot.

“As if I were living with my own son,” she answered, with a tender manner that struck her husband.

Birotteau took Popinot and kissed him, saying,—­

“I have lost the right, forever, of calling him my son.”

“Let us hope!” said Popinot. “Your oil succeeds—­thanks to my advertisements in the newspapers, and to Gaudissart, who has travelled over the whole of France; he has inundated the country with placards and prospectuses; he is now at Strasburg getting the prospectuses printed in the German language, and he is about to descend, like an invasion, upon Germany itself.  We have received orders for three thousand gross.”

“Three thousand gross!” exclaimed Cesar.

“And I have bought a piece of land in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau,—­not dear,—­where I am building a manufactory.”

“Wife,” whispered Cesar to Constance, “with a little help we might have pulled through.”

* * * * *

After that fatal day Cesar, his wife, and daughter understood each other.  The poor clerk resolved to attain an end which, if not impossible, was at least gigantic in its enterprise,—­namely, the payment of his debts to their last penny.  These three beings,—­father, mother, daughter,—­bound together by the tie of a passionate integrity, became misers, denying themselves everything; a farthing was sacred in their eyes.  Out of sheer calculation Cesarine threw herself into her business with the devotion of a young girl.  She sat up at night, taxing her ingenuity to find ways of increasing the prosperity of the establishment, and displaying an innate commercial talent.  The masters of the house were obliged to check her ardor for work; they rewarded her by presents, but she refused all articles of dress and the jewels which they offered her.  Money! money! was her cry.  Every month she carried her salary and her little earnings to her uncle Pillerault.  Cesar did the same; so did Madame Birotteau.  All three, feeling themselves incapable, dared not take upon themselves the responsibility of managing their money, and they made over to Pillerault the whole business of investing their savings.  Returning thus to business, the latter made the most of these funds by negotiations at the Bourse.  It was known afterwards that he had been helped in this work by Jules Desmarets and Joseph Lebas, both of whom were eager to point out opportunities which Pillerault might take without risk.

Cesar, though he lived with his uncle, never ventured to question him as to what was done with the money acquired by his labor and that of his wife and daughter.  He walked the streets with a bowed head, hiding from every eye his stricken, dull, distraught face.  He felt, with self-reproach, that the cloth he wore was too good for him.