came to them by the will of the widow Bidault, Madame Saillard's
mother. Saillard's salary from the government had always been four
thousand five hundred francs a year, and no more; his situation was a
blind alley that led nowhere, and had tempted no one to supersede him.
Those ninety thousand francs, put together sou by sou, were the fruit
therefore of a sordid economy unintelligently employed. In fact, the
Saillards did not know how better to manage their savings than to
carry them, five thousand francs at a time, to their notary, Monsieur
Sorbier, Cardot's predecessor, and let him invest them at five per
cent in first mortgages, with the wife's rights reserved in case the
borrower was married! In 1804 Madame Saillard obtained a government
office for the sale of stamped papers, a circumstance which brought a
servant into the household for the first time. At the time of which we
write, the house, which was worth a hundred thousand francs, brought
in a rental of eight thousand. Falleix paid seven per cent for the
sixty thousand invested in the foundry, besides an equal division of
profits. The Saillards were therefore enjoying an income of not less
than seventeen thousand francs a year. The whole ambition of the good
man now centred on obtaining the cross of the Legion and his retiring
pension.

Elisabeth, the only child, had toiled steadily from infancy in a home
where the customs of life were rigid and the ideas simple. A new hat
for Saillard was a matter of deliberation; the time a coat could last
was estimated and discussed; umbrellas were carefully hung up by means
of a brass buckle. Since 1804 no repairs of any kind had been done to
the house. The Saillards kept the ground-floor in precisely the state
in which their predecessor left it. The gilding of the pier-glasses
was rubbed off; the paint on the cornices was hardly visible through
the layers of dust that time had collected. The fine large rooms still