francs, if you haggle a little.  Or you need not give yourself so much trouble.  Apply to a specialist, Pere Issacar, for instance.  He will procure magnificent ancestors for you; not dear either!  If you will consent to descend to simple magistrates, the price will be insignificant.  Chief justices are dirt cheap.  Naturally, if you wish to be of the military profession, to have eminent clergy among your antecedents, the price increases.  Pere Issacar is the only one who can give you, at a reasonable rate, ermine-draped bishops, or a colonel with a Louis XIV wig, and, if you wish it, a blue ribbon and a breast-plate under his red coat.  What produces a good effect in a series of family portraits is a series of pastels.  What would you say to a goggle-eyed abbe, or an old lady indecently decolletee, or a captain of dragoons wearing a tigerskin cap (it is ten francs more if he has the cross of St. Louis)?  Pere Issacar knows his business, and always has in reserve thirty of these portraits in charming frames of the period, made expressly for him in the Faubourg St.-Antoine, and which have all been buried fifteen days and riddled with shot, in order to have the musty appearance and indispensable worm holes.

You can understand now why the estimable Jew, in passing through the Louvre for his weekly promenade, took an interest in little Maria copying the charming Marquise de Latour.  He was just at this time short of powdered marquises, and they are always very much in demand.  He begged the young woman to take her copy home and make twelve more of it, varying, only the color of the dress and some particular detail in each portrait.  Thus, instead of the pug dog, marquise No. 2 would hold a King Charles spaniel, No. 2 a monkey, No. 3 a bonbon box, No. 4 a fan.  The face could remain the same.  All marquises looked alike to Pere Issacar; he only exacted that they should all be provided with two black patches, one under the right eye, the other on the left shoulder.  This he insisted upon, for the patch, in his eyes, was a symbol of the eighteenth century.

Pere Issacar was a fair man and promised to furnish frames, paper, and pastels, and to pay the young girl fifteen francs for each marquise.  What was better yet, he promised, if he was pleased with the first work, to order of the young artist a dozen canonesses of Remiremont and a half-dozen of royal gendarmes.

I wish you could have seen those ladies when Maria went home to tell the good news.  Louise had just returned from distributing semiquavers in the city; her eyes and poor Mother Gerard’s were filled with tears of joy.

“What, my darling,” said the mother, embracing her child, “are you going to trouble yourself about our necessaries of life, too?”

“Do you see this little sister?” said Louise, laughing cordially.  “She is going to earn a pile of money as large as she is herself.  Do you know that I am jealous—­I, with my piano and my displeasing profession?  Good-luck to pastel!  It is not noisy, it will not annoy the neighbors, and when you are old you can say, ‘I never have played for anybody.’”