true? Politics burn in these days. We have one hundred good thousand
francs invested outside of our business, our productions, our
merchandise. If you want to increase your fortune, do as they did in
1793. The Funds are at sixty-two: buy into the Funds. You will get ten
thousand francs' income, and the investment won't hamper our property.
Take advantage of the occasion to marry our daughter; sell the
business, and let us go and live in your native place. Why! for
fifteen years you have talked of nothing but buying Les Tresorieres,
that pretty little property near Chinon, where there are woods and
fields, and ponds and vineyards, and two dairies, which bring in a
thousand crowns a year, with a house which we both like,--all of which
we can have for sixty thousand francs; and, lo! Monsieur now wants to
become something under government! Recollect what we are,--perfumers.
If sixteen years before you invented the DOUBLE PASTE OF SULTANS and
the CARMINATIVE BALM some one had said, 'You are going to make enough
money to buy Les Tresorieres,' wouldn't you have been half sick with
joy? Well, you can acquire that property which you wanted so much that
you hardly opened your mouth about anything else, and now you talk of
spending on nonsense money earned by the sweat of our brow: I can say
ours, for I've sat behind the desk through all that time, like a poor
dog in his kennel. Isn't it much better to come and visit our daughter
after she is married to a notary of Paris, and live eight months of
the year at Chinon, than to begin here to make five sous six blanks,
and of six blanks nothing? Wait for a rise in the Funds, and you can
give eight thousand francs a year to your daughter and we can keep two
thousand for ourselves, and the proceeds of the business will allow us
to buy Les Tresorieres. There in your native place, my good little
cat, with our furniture, which is worth a great deal, we shall live
like princes; whereas here we want at least a million to make any
figure at all."