Except during the time required for her household duties, Madame
Sauviat was always seated in a rickety wooden chair placed against the
corner pillar of the building. There she knitted and looked at the
passers, watched over the old iron, sold and weighed it, and received
payment if Sauviat was away making purchases. When at home the husband
could be heard at daybreak pushing open his shutters; the household
dog rushed out into the street; and Madame Sauviat presently came out
to help her man in spreading upon the natural counter made by the low
walls on either side of the corner of the house on the two streets,
the multifarious collection of bells, springs, broken gunlocks, and
the other rubbish of their business, which gave a poverty-stricken
look to the establishment, though it usually contained as much as
twenty thousand francs' worth of lead, steel, iron, and other metals.

Never were the former peddler and his wife known to speak of their
fortune; they concealed its amount as carefully as a criminal hides a
crime; and for years they were suspected of shaving both gold and
silver coins. When Champagnac died the Sauviats made no inventory of
his property; but they rummaged, with the intelligence of rats, into
every nook and corner of the old man's house, left it as naked as a
corpse, and sold the wares it contained in their own shop.

Once a year, in December, Sauviat went to Paris in one of the public
conveyances. The gossips of the neighborhood concluded that in order
to conceal from others the amount of his fortune, he invested it
himself on these occasions. It was known later that, having been
connected in his youth with one of the most celebrated dealers in
metal, an Auvergnat like himself, who was living in Paris, Sauviat
placed his funds with the firm of Bresac, the mainspring and spine of