At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
mention his notary as an accommodating man, and managed to get a second
profit out of the bargain, thanks to this arrangement, which had made it
a proverb among the traders of the Rue Saint-Denis: “Heaven preserve you
from Monsieur Guillaume’s notary!” to signify a heavy discount.
The old merchant was to be seen standing on the threshold of his shop,
as if by a miracle, the instant the servant withdrew. Monsieur Guillaume
looked at the Rue Saint-Denis, at the neighboring shops, and at the
weather, like a man disembarking at Havre, and seeing France once more
after a long voyage. Having convinced himself that nothing had changed
while he was asleep, he presently perceived the stranger on guard, and
he, on his part, gazed at the patriarchal draper as Humboldt may have
scrutinized the first electric eel he saw in America. Monsieur Guillaume
wore loose black velvet breeches, pepper-and-salt stockings, and square
toed shoes with silver buckles. His coat, with square-cut fronts,
square-cut tails, and square-cut collar clothed his slightly bent figure
in greenish cloth, finished with white metal buttons, tawny from wear.
His gray hair was so accurately combed and flattened over his yellow
pate that it made it look like a furrowed field. His little green eyes,
that might have been pierced with a gimlet, flashed beneath arches
faintly tinged with red in the place of eyebrows. Anxieties had wrinkled
his forehead with as many horizontal lines as there were creases in his
coat. This colorless face expressed patience, commercial shrewdness,
and the sort of wily cupidity which is needful in business. At that
time these old families were less rare than they are now, in which the
characteristic habits and costume of their calling, surviving in
the midst of more recent civilization, were preserved as cherished
traditions, like the antediluvian remains found by Cuvier in the
quarries.
The head of the Guillaume family was a notable upholder of ancient
practices; he might be heard to regret the Provost of Merchants, and
never did he mention a decision of the Tribunal of Commerce without
calling it the _Sentence of the Consuls_. Up and dressed the first of
the household, in obedience, no doubt, to these old customs, he stood
sternly awaiting the appearance of his three assistants, ready to scold
them in case they were late. These young disciples of Mercury knew
nothing more terrible than the wordless assiduity with which the master
scrutinized their faces and their movements on Monday in search of
evidence or traces of their pranks. But at this moment the old clothier
paid no heed to his apprentices; he was absorbed in trying to divine the
motive of the anxious looks which the young man in silk stockings and a
cloak cast alternately at his signboard and into the depths of his shop.
The daylight was now brighter, and enabled the stranger to discern the
cashier’s corner enclosed by a railing and screened by old green silk
curtains, where were kept the immense ledgers, the silent oracles of the
house. The too inquisitive gazer seemed to covet this little nook,
and to be taking the plan of a dining-room at one side, lighted by
a skylight, whence the family at meals could easily see the smallest
incident that might occur at the shop-door. So much affection for his
dwelling seemed suspicious to a trader who had lived long enough to
remember the law of maximum prices; Monsieur Guillaume naturally thought
that this sinister personage had an eye to the till of the Cat and
Racket. After quietly observing the mute duel which was going on between
his master and the stranger, the eldest of the apprentices, having seen
that the young man was stealthily watching the windows of the third
floor, ventured to place himself on the stone flag where Monsieur
Guillaume was standing. He took two steps out into the street, raised
his head, and fancied that he caught sight of Mademoiselle Augustine
Guillaume in hasty retreat. The draper, annoyed by his assistant’s
perspicacity, shot a side glance at him; but the draper and his amorous
apprentice were suddenly relieved from the fears which the young man’s
presence had excited in their minds. He hailed a hackney cab on its
way to a neighboring stand, and jumped into it with an air of affected
indifference. This departure was a balm to the hearts of the other two
lads, who had been somewhat uneasy as to meeting the victim of their
practical joke.
“Well, gentlemen, what ails you that you are standing there with your
arms folded?” said Monsieur Guillaume to his three neophytes. “In former
days, bless you, when I was in Master Chevrel’s service, I should have
overhauled more than two pieces of cloth by this time.”
“Then it was daylight earlier,” said the second assistant, whose duty
this was.
The old shopkeeper could not help smiling. Though two of these
young fellows, who were confided to his care by their fathers, rich
manufacturers at Louviers and at Sedan, had only to ask and to have a
hundred thousand francs the day when they were old enough to settle in
life, Guillaume regarded it as his duty to keep them under the rod of an
old-world despotism, unknown nowadays in the showy modern shops, where
the apprentices expect to be rich men at thirty. He made them work like
Negroes. These three assistants were equal to a business which would
harry ten such clerks as those whose sybaritical tastes now swell the
columns of the budget. Not a sound disturbed the peace of this solemn
house, where the hinges were always oiled, and where the meanest article
of furniture showed the respectable cleanliness which reveals strict
order and economy. The most waggish of the three youths often amused
himself by writing the date of its first appearance on the Gruyere
cheese which was left to their tender mercies at breakfast, and which it
was their pleasure to leave untouched. This bit of mischief, and a few
others of the same stamp, would sometimes bring a smile on the face of
the younger of Guillaume’s daughters, the pretty maiden who has just now
appeared to the bewitched man in the street.
Though each of these apprentices, even the eldest, paid a round sum for
his board, not one of them would have been bold enough to remain at the
master’s table when dessert was served. When Madame Guillaume talked of
dressing the salad, the hapless youths trembled as they thought of the
thrift with which her prudent hand dispensed the oil. They could never
think of spending a night away from the house without having given, long
before, a plausible reason for such an irregularity. Every Sunday, each
in his turn, two of them accompanied the Guillaume family to Mass at
Saint-Leu, and to vespers. Mesdemoiselles Virginie and Augustine, simply
attired in cotton print, each took the arm of an apprentice and walked
in front, under the piercing eye of their mother, who closed the little
family procession with her husband, accustomed by her to carry two large
prayer-books, bound in black morocco. The second apprentice received
no salary. As for the eldest, whose twelve years of perseverance and
discretion had initiated him into the secrets of the house, he was paid
eight hundred francs a year as the reward of his labors. On certain
family festivals he received as a gratuity some little gift, to which
Madame Guillaume’s dry and wrinkled hand alone gave value--netted
purses, which she took care to stuff with cotton wool, to show off the
fancy stitches, braces of the strongest make, or heavy silk stockings.
Sometimes, but rarely, this prime minister was admitted to share the
pleasures of the family when they went into the country, or when, after
waiting for months, they made up their mind to exert the right acquired
by taking a box at the theatre to command a piece which Paris had
already forgotten.
As to the other assistants, the barrier of respect which formerly
divided a master draper from his apprentices was that they would
have been more likely to steal a piece of cloth than to infringe this
time-honored etiquette. Such reserve may now appear ridiculous; but
these old houses were a school of honesty and sound morals. The masters
adopted their apprentices. The young man’s linen was cared for, mended,
and often replaced by the mistress of the house. If an apprentice fell
ill, he was the object of truly maternal attention. In a case of
danger the master lavished his money in calling in the most celebrated
physicians, for he was not answerable to their parents merely for the
good conduct and training of the lads. If one of them, whose character
was unimpeachable, suffered misfortune, these old tradesmen knew how to
value the intelligence he had displayed, and they did not hesitate
to entrust the happiness of their daughters to men whom they had long
trusted with their fortunes. Guillaume was one of these men of the
old school, and if he had their ridiculous side, he had all their good
qualities; and Joseph Lebas, the chief assistant, an orphan without any
fortune, was in his mind destined to be the husband of Virginie, his
elder daughter. But Joseph did not share the symmetrical ideas of his
master, who would not for an empire have given his second daughter in
marriage before the elder. The unhappy assistant felt that his heart was
wholly given to Mademoiselle Augustine, the younger. In order to justify
this passion, which had grown up in secret, it is necessary to inquire
a little further into the springs of the absolute government which ruled
the old cloth-merchant’s household.
Guillaume had two daughters. The elder, Mademoiselle Virginie, was
the very image of her mother. Madame Guillaume, daughter of the Sieur
Chevrel, sat so upright in the stool behind her desk, that more than
once she had heard some wag bet that she was a stuffed figure. Her
long, thin face betrayed exaggerated piety. Devoid of attractions or of
amiable manners, Madame Guillaume commonly decorated her head--that of
a woman near on sixty--with a cap of a particular and unvarying shape,
with long lappets, like that of a widow. In all the neighborhood she was
known as the “portress nun.” Her speech was curt, and her movements had
the stiff precision of a semaphore. Her eye, with a gleam in it like a
cat’s, seemed to spite the world because she was so ugly. Mademoiselle
Virginie, brought up, like her younger sister, under the domestic rule
of her mother, had reached the age of eight-and-twenty. Youth mitigated
the graceless effect which her likeness to her mother sometimes gave
to her features, but maternal austerity had endowed her with two great
qualities which made up for everything. She was patient and gentle.
Mademoiselle Augustine, who was but just eighteen, was not like either
her father or her mother. She was one of those daughters whose total
absence of any physical affinity with their parents makes one believe in
the adage: “God gives children.” Augustine was little, or, to describe
her more truly, delicately made. Full of gracious candor, a man of the
world could have found no fault in the charming girl beyond a certain
meanness of gesture or vulgarity of attitude, and sometimes a want of
ease. Her silent and placid face was full of the transient melancholy
which comes over all young girls who are too weak to dare to resist
their mother’s will.
The two sisters, always plainly dressed, could not gratify the innate
vanity of womanhood but by a luxury of cleanliness which became them
wonderfully, and made them harmonize with the polished counters and
the shining shelves, on which the old man-servant never left a speck of
dust, and with the old-world simplicity of all they saw about them. As
their style of living compelled them to find the elements of happiness
in persistent work, Augustine and Virginie had hitherto always satisfied