“Well, I won’t say that I will take all; but I’ll manage the short ones.”
“For the want of a thousand francs—sure to be repaid in four months—don’t throw me into the hands of the blood-suckers who get the best of our profits; do take all, monsieur! I do so little in the way of discount that I have no credit; that is what kills us little retailers.”
“Well, I’ll cash your notes; Celestin will make out the account. Be ready at eleven, will you? There’s my architect, Monsieur Grindot,” said the perfumer, catching sight of the young man, with whom he had made an appointment at Monsieur de la Billardiere’s the night before.
“Contrary to the custom of men of talent you are punctual, monsieur,” said Cesar, displaying his finest commercial graces. “If punctuality, in the words of our king,—a man of wit as well as a statesman,—is the politeness of princes, it is also the wealth of merchants. Time, time is gold, especially to you artists. I permit myself to say to you that architecture is the union of all the arts. We will not enter through the shop,” he added, opening the private door of his house.
Four years earlier Monsieur Grindot had carried off the grand prix in architecture, and had lately returned from Rome where he had spent three years at the cost of the State. In Italy the young man had dreamed of art; in Paris he thought of fortune. Government alone can pay the needful millions to raise an architect to glory; it is therefore natural that every ambitious youth of that calling, returning from Rome and thinking himself a Fontaine or a Percier, should bow before the administration. The liberal student became a royalist, and sought to win the favor of influential persons. When a grand prix man behaves thus, his comrades call him a trimmer. The young architect in question had two ways open to him,—either to serve the perfumer well, or put him under contribution. Birotteau the deputy-mayor, Birotteau the future possessor of half the lands about the Madeleine, where he would sooner or later build up a fine neighborhood, was a man to keep on good terms with. Grindot accordingly resolved to sacrifice his immediate gains to his future interests. He listened patiently to the plans, the repetitions, and the ideas of this worthy specimen of the bourgeois class, the constant butt of the witty shafts and ridicule of artists, and the object of their everlasting contempt, nodding his head as if to show the perfumer that he caught his ideas. When Cesar had thoroughly explained everything, the young man proceeded to sum up for him his own plan.
“You have now three front windows on the first floor, besides the window on the staircase which lights the landing; to these four windows you mean to add two on the same level in the next house, by turning the staircase, so as to open a way from one house to the other on the street side.”
“You have understood me perfectly,” said the perfumer, surprised.
“To carry out your plan, you must light the new staircase from above, and manage to get a porter’s lodge beneath it.”
“Beneath it?”
“Yes, the space over which it rests—”