“Why?”
“To strangle your rivals, simpleton! If I take their orders I can make their perfidious cosmetics drink oil, simply by talking and working for yours only. A first-rate traveller’s trick! Ha! ha! we are the diplomatists of commerce. Famous! As for your prospectus, I’ll take charge of that. I’ve got a friend—early childhood—Andoche Finot, son of the hat-maker in the Rue du Coq, the old buffer who launched me into travelling on hats. Andoche, who has a great deal of wit,—he got it all out of the heads tiled by his father,—he is in literature; he does the minor theatres in the ‘Courrier des Spectacles.’ His father, an old dog chock-full of reasons for not liking wit, won’t believe in it; impossible to make him see that mind can be sold, sells itself in fact: he won’t believe in anything but the three-sixes. Old Finot manages young Finot by famine. Andoche, a capable man, no fool,—I don’t consort with fools, except commercially,—Andoche makes epigrams for the ‘Fidele Berger,’ which pays; while the other papers, for which he works like a galley-slave, keep him down on his marrow-bones in the dust. Are not they jealous, those fellows? Just the same in the article-Paris! Finot wrote a superb comedy in one act for Mademoiselle Mars, most glorious of the glorious!—ah, there’s a woman I love!—Well, in order to get it played he had to take it to the Gaite. Andoche understands prospectuses, he worms himself into the mercantile mind; and he’s not proud, he’ll concoct it for us gratis. Damn it! with a bowl of punch and a few cakes we’ll get it out of him; for, Popinot, no nonsense! I am to travel on your commission without pay: your competitors shall pay; I’ll diddle it out of them. Let us understand each other clearly. As for me, this triumph is an affair of honor. My reward is to be best man at your wedding! I shall go to Italy, Germany, England! I shall carry with me placards in all languages, paste them everywhere, in villages, on doors of churches, all the best spots I can find in provincial towns! The oil shall sparkle, scintillate, glisten on every head. Ha! your marriage shall not be a sham; we’ll make it a pageant, colors flying! You shall have your Cesarine, or my name shall not be ILLUSTRIOUS,—that is what Pere Finot calls me for having got off his gray hats. In selling your oil I keep to my own sphere, the human head; hats and oil are well-known preservatives of the public hair.”
Popinot returned to his aunt’s house, where he was to sleep, in such a fever, caused by his visions of success, that the streets seemed to him to be running oil. He slept little, dreamed that his hair was madly growing, and saw two angels who unfolded, as they do in melodramas, a scroll on which was written “Oil Cesarine.” He woke, recollected the dream, and vowed to give the oil of nuts that sacred name, accepting the sleeping fancy as a celestial mandate.
Cesar and Popinot were at their work-shop in the Faubourg du Temple the next morning long before the arrival of the nuts. While waiting for Madame Madou’s porters, Popinot triumphantly recounted his treaty of alliance with Gaudissart.
“Have we indeed the illustrious Gaudissart? Then are we millionaires!” cried the perfumer, extending his hand to his cashier with an air which Louis XIV. must have worn when he received the Marechal de Villars on his return from Denain.
“We have something besides,” said the happy clerk, producing from his pocket a bottle of a squat shape, like a pumpkin, and ribbed on the sides. “I have found ten thousand bottles like that, all made ready to hand, at four sous, and six months’ credit.”
“Anselme,” said Birotteau, contemplating the wondrous shape of the flask, “yesterday [here his tone of voice became solemn] in the Tuileries,—yes, no later than yesterday,—you said to me, ‘I will succeed.’ To-day I—I say to you, ‘You will succeed.’ Four sous! six months! an unparalleled shape! Macassar trembles to its foundations! Was I not right to seize upon the only nuts in Paris? Where did you find these bottles?”
“I was waiting to speak to Gaudissart, and sauntering—”
“Just like me, when I found the Arab book,” cried Birotteau.