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The Lesser Bourgeoisie
“You are, I must acknowledge, a most extraordinary man.”
“Why, no! the smallest as well as the greatest of my efforts are merely the reflections of the flame which you have kindled. I intend to be your son-in-law that we may never part. My wife, heavens! what could she be to me but a machine for child-bearing? whereas the divinity, the sublime being will be – you,” he whispered in her ear.
“You are Satan!” she said, in a sort of terror.
“No, I am something of a poet, like all the men of my region. Come, be my Josephine! I’ll go and see you to-morrow. I have the most ardent desire to see where you live and how you live, the furniture you use, the color of your stuffs, the arrangement of all things about you. I long to see the pearl in its shell.”
He slipped away cleverly after these words, without waiting for an answer.
Flavie, to whom in all her life love had never taken the language of romance, sat still, but happy, her heart palpitating, and saying to herself that it was very difficult to escape such influence. For the first time Theodose had appeared in a pair of new trousers, with gray silk stockings and pumps, a waistcoat of black silk, and a cravat of black satin on the knot of which shone a plain gold pin selected with taste. He wore also a new coat in the last fashion, and yellow gloves, relieved by white shirt-cuffs; he was the only man who had manners, or deportment in that salon, which was now filling up for the evening.
Madame Pron, nee Barniol, arrived with two school-girls, aged seventeen, confided to her maternal care by families residing in Martinique. Monsieur Pron, professor of rhetoric in a college presided over by priests, belonged to the Phellion class; but, instead of expanding on the surface in phrases and demonstrations, and posing as an example, he was dry and sententious. Monsieur and Madame Pron, the flowers of the Phellion salon, received every Monday. Though a professor, the little man danced. He enjoyed great influence in the quarter enclosed by the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse, the Luxembourg, and the rue de Sevres. Therefore, as soon as Phellion saw his friend, he took him by the arm into a corner to inform him of the Thuillier candidacy. After ten minutes’ consultation they both went to find Thuillier, and the recess of a window, opposite to that where Flavie still sat absorbed in her reflections, no doubt, heard a “trio” worthy, in its way, of that of the Swiss in “Guillaume Tell.”
“Do you see,” said Theodose, returning to Flavie, “the pure and honest Phellion intriguing over there? Give a personal reason to a virtuous man and he’ll paddle in the slimiest puddle; he is hooking that little Pron, and Pron is taking it all in, solely to get your little Celeste for Felix Phellion. Separate them, and in ten minutes they’ll get together again, and that young Minard will be growling round them like an angry bulldog.”
Felix, still under the strong emotion imparted to him by Celeste’s generous action and the cry that came from the girl’s heart, though no one but Madame Thuillier still thought of it, became inspired by one of those ingenuous artfulnesses which are the honest charlatanism of true love; but he was not to the manner born of it, and mathematics, moreover, made him somewhat absent-minded. He stationed himself near Madame Thuillier, imagining that Madame Thuillier would attract Celeste to her side. This astute calculation succeeded all the better because young Minard, who saw in Celeste nothing more than a “dot,” had no such sudden inspiration, and was drinking his coffee and talking politics with Laudigeois, Monsieur Barniol, and Dutocq by order of his father, who was thinking and planning for the general election of the legislature in 1842.
“Who wouldn’t love Celeste?” said Felix to Madame Thuillier.
“Little darling, no one in the world loves me as she does,” replied the poor slave, with difficulty restraining her tears.
“Ah! madame, we both love you,” said the candid professor, sincerely.
“What are you saying to each other?” asked Celeste, coming up.
“My child,” said the pious woman, drawing her god-daughter down to her and kissing her on the forehead. “He said that you both loved me.”
“Do not be angry with my presumption, mademoiselle. Let me do all I can to prove it,” murmured Felix. “Ah! I cannot help it, I was made this way; injustice revolts me to the soul! Yes, the Saviour of men was right to promise the future to the meek heart, to the slain lamb! A man who did not love you, Celeste, must have adored you after that sublime impulse of yours at table. Ah, yes! innocence alone can console the martyr. You are a kind young girl; you will be one of those wives who make the glory and the happiness of a family. Happy be he whom you will choose!”
“Godmamma, with what eyes do you think Monsieur Felix sees me?”
“He appreciates you, my little angel; I shall pray to God for both of you.”
“If you knew how happy I am that my father can do a service to Monsieur Thuillier, and how I wish I could be useful to your brother – ”
“In short,” said Celeste, laughing, “you love us all.”
“Well, yes,” replied Felix.
True love wraps itself in the mysteries of reserve, even in its expression; it proves itself by itself; it does not feel the necessity, as a false love does, of lighting a conflagration. By an observer (if such a being could have glided into the Thuillier salon) a book might have been made in comparing the two scenes of love-making, and in watching the enormous preparations of Theodose and the simplicity of Felix: one was nature, the other was society, – the true and the false embodied. Noticing her daughter glowing with happiness, exhaling her soul through the pores of her face, and beautiful with the beauty of a young girl gathering the first roses of an indirect declaration, Flavie had an impulse of jealousy in her heart. She came across to Celeste and said in her ear: —
“You are not behaving well, my daughter; everybody is observing you; you are compromising yourself by talking so long to Monsieur Felix without knowing whether we approve of it.”
“But, mamma, my godmother is here.”
“Ah! pardon me, dear friend,” said Madame Colleville; “I did not notice you.”
“You do as others do,” said the poor nonentity.
That reply stung Madame Colleville, who regarded it as a barbed arrow. She cast a haughty glance at Felix and said to Celeste, “Sit there, my daughter,” seating herself at the same time beside Madame Thuillier and pointing to a chair on the other side of her.
“I will work myself to death,” said Felix to Madame Thuillier. “I’ll be a member of the Academy of Sciences; I’ll make some great discovery, and win her hand by force of fame.”
“Ah!” thought the poor woman to herself, “I ought to have had a gentle, peaceful, learned man like that. I might have slowly developed in a life of quietness. It was not thy will, O God! but, I pray thee, unite and bless these children; they are made for one another.”
And she sat there, pensive, listening to the racket made by her sister-in-law – a ten-horse power at work – who now, lending a hand to her two servants, cleared the table, taking everything out of the dining-room to accommodate the dancers, vociferating, like the captain of a frigate on his quarter-deck when taking his ship into action: “Have you plenty of raspberry syrup?” “Run out and buy some more orgeat!” “There’s not enough glasses. Where’s the ‘eau rougie’? Take those six bottles of ‘vin ordinaire’ and make more. Mind that Coffinet, the porter, doesn’t get any.” “Caroline, my girl, you are to wait at the sideboard; you’ll have tongue and ham to slice in case they dance till morning. But mind, no waste! Keep an eye on everything. Pass me the broom; put more oil in those lamps; don’t make blunders. Arrange the remains of the dessert so as to make a show on the sideboard; ask my sister to come and help us. I’m sure I don’t know what she’s thinking about, that dawdle! Heavens, how slow she is! Here, take away these chairs, they’ll want all the room they can get.”
The salon was full of Barniols, Collevilles, Phellions, Laudigeois, and many others whom the announcement of a dance at the Thuilliers’, spread about in the Luxembourg between two and four in the afternoon, the hour at which the bourgeoisie takes its walk, had drawn thither.
“Are you ready, Brigitte?” said Colleville, bolting into the dining-room; “it is nine o’clock, and they are packed as close as herrings in the salon. Cardot, his wife and son and daughter and future son-in-law have just come, accompanied by that young Vinet; the whole faubourg Saint Antoine is debouching. Can’t we move the piano in here?”
Then he gave the signal, by tuning his clarionet, the joyous sounds of which were greeted with huzzas from the salon.
It is useless to describe a ball of this kind. The toilets, faces, and conversations were all in keeping with one fact which will surely suffice even the dullest imagination; they passed round, on tarnished and discolored trays, common tumblers filled with wine, “eau rougie,” and “eau sucree.” The trays on which were glasses of orgeat and glasses of syrup and water appeared only at long intervals. There were five card-tables and twenty-five players, and eighteen dancers of both sexes. At one o’clock in the morning, all present – Madame Thuillier, Mademoiselle Brigitte, Madame Phellion, even Phellion himself – were dragged into the vivacities of a country-dance, vulgarly called “La Boulangere,” in which Dutocq figured with a veil over his head, after the manner of the Kabyl. The servants who were waiting to escort their masters home, and those of the household, were audience to this performance; and after the interminable dance had lasted one whole hour it was proposed to carry Brigitte in triumph when she gave the announcement that supper was served. This circumstance made her see the necessity of hiding a dozen bottles of old burgundy. In short, the company had amused themselves so well, the matrons as well as the young girls, that Thuillier found occasion to say: —
“Well, well, this morning we little thought we should have such a fete to-night.”
“There’s never more pleasure,” said the notary Cardot, “than in just such improvised balls. Don’t talk to me of parties where everybody stands on ceremony.”
This opinion, we may remark, is a standing axiom among the bourgeoisie.
“Well, for my part,” said Madame Minard, “I prefer the dignified old ways.”
“We didn’t mean that for you, madame; your salon is the chosen haunt of pleasure,” said Dutocq.
When “La Boulangere” came to an end, Theodose pulled Dutocq from the sideboard where he was preparing to eat a slice of tongue, and said to him: —
“Let us go; we must be at Cerizet’s very early in the morning; we ought both of us to think over that affair; it is not so easy to manage as Cerizet seems to imagine.”
“Why not?” asked Dutocq, bringing his slice of tongue to eat in the salon.
“Don’t you know the law?”
“I know enough of it to be aware of the dangers of the affair. If that notary wants the house and we filch it from him, there are means by which he can recover it; he can put himself into the skin of a registered creditor. By the present legal system relating to mortgages, when a house is sold at the request of creditors, if the price obtained for it at auction is not enough to pay all debts, the owners have the right to bid it in and hold it for a higher sum; now the notary, seeing himself caught, may back out of the sale in that way.”
“Well,” said la Peyrade, “it needs attention.”
“Very good,” replied Dutocq, “we’ll go and see Cerizet.”
These words, “go and see Cerizet,” were overheard by Minard, who was following the two associates; but they offered no meaning to his mind. The two men were so outside of his own course and projects that he heard them without listening to them.
“This has been one of the finest days in our lives,” said Brigitte to her brother, when she found herself alone with him in the deserted salon, at half-past two in the morning. “What a distinction! to be thus selected by your fellow-citizens!”
“Don’t be mistaken about it, Brigitte; we owe it all, my child, to one man.”
“What man?”
“To our friend, la Peyrade.”
CHAPTER IX. THE BANKER OF THE POOR
It was not on the next day, Monday, but on the following day, Tuesday, that Dutocq and Theodose went to see Cerizet, the former having called la Peyrade’s attention to the fact that Cerizet always absented himself on Sundays and Mondays, taking advantage of the total absence of clients on those days, which are devoted by the populace to debauch. The house toward which they directed their steps is one of the striking features in the faubourg Saint-Jacques, and it is quite as important to study it here as it was to study those of Phellion and Thuillier. It is not known (true, no commission has yet been appointed to examine this phenomenon), no one knows why certain quarters become degraded and vulgarized, morally as well as materially; why, for instance, the ancient residence of the court and the church, the Luxembourg and the Latin quarter, have become what they are to-day, in spite of the presence of the finest palaces in the world, in spite of the bold cupola of Sainte-Genevieve, that of Mansard on the Val-de-Grace, and the charms of the Jardin des Plantes. One asks one’s self why the elegance of life has left that region; why the Vauquer houses, the Phellion and the Thuillier houses now swarm with tenants and boarders, on the site of so many noble and religious buildings, and why such mud and dirty trades and poverty should have fastened on a hilly piece of ground, instead of spreading out upon the flat land beyond the confines of the ancient city.
The angel whose beneficence once hovered above this quarter being dead, usury, on the lowest scale, rushed in and took his place. To the old judge, Popinot, succeeded Cerizet; and strange to say, – a fact which it is well to study, – the effect produced, socially speaking, was much the same. Popinot loaned money without interest, and was willing to lose; Cerizet lost nothing, and compelled the poor to work hard and stay virtuous. The poor adored Popinot, but they did not hate Cerizet. Here, in this region, revolves the lowest wheel of Parisian financiering. At the top, Nucingen & Co., the Kellers, du Tillet, and the Mongenods; a little lower down, the Palmas, Gigonnets, and Gobsecks; lower still, the Samonons, Chaboisseaus, and Barbets; and lastly (after the pawn-shops) comes this king of usury, who spreads his nets at the corners of the streets to entangle all miseries and miss none, – Cerizet, “money lender by the little week.”
The frogged frock-coat will have prepared you for the den in which this convicted stock-broker carried on his present business.
The house was humid with saltpetre; the walls, sweating moisture, were enamelled all over with large slabs of mould. Standing at the corner of the rue des Postes and rue des Poules, it presented first a ground-floor, occupied partly by a shop for the sale of the commonest kind of wine, painted a coarse bright red, decorated with curtains of red calico, furnished with a leaden counter, and guarded by formidable iron bars. Above the gate of an odious alley hung a frightful lantern, on which were the words “Night lodgings here.” The outer walls were covered with iron crossbars, showing, apparently, the insecurity of the building, which was owned by the wine-merchant, who also inhabited the entresol. The widow Poiret (nee Michonneau) kept furnished lodgings on the first, second, and third floors, consisting of single rooms for workmen and for the poorest class of students.
Cerizet occupied one room on the ground-floor and another in the entresol, to which he mounted by an interior staircase; this entresol looked out upon a horrible paved court, from which arose mephitic odors. Cerizet paid forty francs a month to the widow Poiret for his breakfast and dinner; he thus conciliated her by becoming her boarder; he also made himself acceptable to the wine-merchant by procuring him an immense sale of wine and liquors among his clients – profits realized before sunrise; the wine-shop beginning operations about three in the morning in summer, and five in winter.
The hour of the great Market, which so many of his clients, male and female, attended, was the determining cause of Cerizet’s early hours. The Sieur Cadenet, the wine-merchant, in view of the custom which he owed to the usurer, had let him the two rooms for the low price of eighty francs a year, and had given him a lease for twelve years, which Cerizet alone had a right to break, without paying indemnity, at three months’ notice. Cadenet always carried in a bottle of excellent wine for the dinner of this useful tenant; and when Cerizet was short of money he had only to say to his friend, “Cadenet, lend me a few hundred francs,” – loans which he faithfully repaid.
Cadenet, it was said, had proof of the widow Poiret having deposited in Cerizet’s hands some two thousand francs for investment, which may explain the progress of the latter’s affairs since the day when he first took up his abode in the quarter, supplied with a last note of a thousand francs and Dutocq’s protection. Cadenet, prompted by a cupidity which success increased, had proposed, early in the year, to put twenty thousand francs into the hands of his friend Cerizet. But Cerizet had positively declined them, on the ground that he ran risks of a nature to become a possible cause of dispute with associates.
“I could only,” he said to Cadenet, “take them at six per cent interest, and you can do better than that in your own business. We will go into partnership later, if you like, in some serious enterprise, some good opportunity which may require, say, fifty thousand francs. When you have got that sum to invest, let me know, and we’ll talk about it.”
Cerizet had only suggested the affair of the house to Theodose after making sure that among the three, Madame Poiret, Cadenet, and himself, it was impossible to raise the full sum of one hundred thousand francs.
The “lender by the little week” was thus in perfect safety in his den, where he could even, if necessity came, appeal to the law. On certain mornings there might be seen as many as sixty or eighty persons, men as often as women, either in the wine-shop, or the alley, or sitting on the staircase, for the distrustful Cerizet would only admit six persons at a time into his office. The first comers were first served, and each had to go by his number, which the wine-merchant, or his shop-boy, affixed to the hats of the man and the backs of the women. Sometimes the clients would sell to each other (as hackney-coachmen do on the cabstands), head numbers for tail numbers. On certain days, when the market business was pressing, a head number was often sold for a glass of brandy and a sou. The numbers, as they issued from Cerizet’s office, called up the succeeding numbers; and if any disputes arose Cadenet put a stop to the fray at once my remarking: —
“If you get the police here you won’t gain anything; he’ll shut up shop.”
HE was Cerizet’s name. When, in the course of the day, some hapless woman, without an atom of food in her room, and seeing her children pale with hunger, would come to borrow ten or twenty sous, she would say to the wine-merchant anxiously: —
“Is he there?”
Cadenet, a short, stout man, dressed in blue, with outer sleeves of black stuff and a wine-merchant’s apron, and always wearing a cap, seemed an angel to these mothers when he replied to them: —
“He told me that you were an honest woman and I might give you forty sous. You know what you must do about it – ”
And, strange to say, he was blessed by these poor people, even as they had lately blessed Popinot.
But Cerizet was cursed on Sunday mornings when accounts were settled; and they cursed him even more on Saturdays, when it was necessary to work in order to repay the sum borrowed with interest. But, after all, he was Providence, he was God from Tuesday to Friday of every week.
The room which he made his office, formerly the kitchen of the next floor, was bare; the beams of the ceiling had been whitewashed, but still bore marks of smoke. The walls, along which he had put benches, and the stone floor, retained and gave out dampness. The fireplace, where the crane remained, was partly filled by an iron stove in which Cerizet burned sea-coal when the weather was severe. A platform about half a foot high and eight feet square extended from the edge of the fireplace; on it was fastened a common table and an armchair with a round cushion covered with green leather. Behind him, Cerizet had sheathed the walls with planks; also protecting himself with a little wooden screen, painted white, from the draught between the window and door; but this screen, made of two leaves, was so placed that the warmth from the stove reached him. The window had enormous inside shutters of cast-iron, held, when closed, by a bar. The door commanded respect by an armor of the same character.
At the farther end of this room, in a corner, was a spiral-staircase, coming, evidently, from some pulled-down shop, and bought in the rue Chapon by Cadenet, who had fitted it through the ceiling into the room in the entresol occupied by Cerizet. In order to prevent all communication with the upper floors, Cerizet had exacted that the door of that room which opened on the common landing should be walled up. The place had thus become a fortress. The bedroom above had a cheap carpet bought for twenty francs, an iron bedstead, a bureau, three chairs, and an iron safe, made by a good workman, which Cerizet had bought at a bargain. He shaved before a glass on the chimney-piece; he owned two pairs of cotton sheets and six cotton shirts; the rest of his visible wardrobe was of the same character. Cadenet had once seen Cerizet dressed like a dandy of the period; he must, therefore, have kept hidden, in some drawer of his bureau, a complete disguise with which he could go to the opera, see the world, and not be recognized, for, had it not been that Cadenet heard his voice, he would certainly have asked him who he was.
What pleased the clients of this man most was his joviality and his repartees; he talked their language. Cadenet, his two shop-men, and Cerizet, living in the midst of dreadful misery, behaved with the calmness of undertakers in presence of afflicted heirs, of old sergeants of the Guard among heaps of dead. They no more shuddered on hearing cries of hunger and despair than surgeons shudder at the cries of their patients in hospital; they said, as the soldiers and the dressers said, the perfunctory words, “Have patience! a little courage! What’s the good of grieving? Suppose you kill yourself, what then? One gets accustomed to everything; be reasonable!”
Though Cerizet took the precaution to hide the money necessary for his morning operations in the hollow seat of the chair in which he sat, taking out no more than a hundred francs at a time, which he put in the pockets of his trousers, never dipping into the funds of the chair except between the entrance of two batches of clients (keeping his door locked and not opening it till all was safely stowed in his pockets), he had really nothing to fear from the various despairs which found their way from all sides to this rendezvous of misery. Certainly, there are many different ways of being honest and virtuous; and the “Monograph of Virtue” has no other basis than this social axiom.1 A man is false to his conscience; he fails, apparently, in delicacy; he forfeits that bloom of honor which, though lost, does not, as yet, mean general disrepute; at last, however, he fails decidedly in honor; if he falls into the hands of the correctional police, he is not, as yet, guilty of crime before the court of assizes; but after he is branded with infamy by the verdict of a jury he may still be honored at the galleys for the species of honor and integrity practised by criminals among themselves, which consists in not betraying each other, in sharing booty loyally, and in running all dangers. Well, this last form of honor – which is perhaps a calculation, a necessity, the practice of which offers certain opportunities for grandeur to the guilty man and the possibility of a return to good – reigned absolutely between Cerizet and his clients. Never did Cerizet make an error, nor his poor people either; neither side ever denied what was due, either capital or interests. Many a time Cerizet, who was born among the people, corrected from one week to another some accidental error, to the benefit of a poor man who had never discovered it. He was called a Jew, but an honest one, and his word in that city of sorrows was sacred. A woman died, causing a loss to him of thirty francs:
“See my profits! there they go!” he said to his assemblage, “and you howl upon me! You know I’ll never trouble the brats; in fact, Cadenet has already taken them bread and heel-taps.”
After that it was said of him in both faubourgs: —
“He is not a bad fellow!”
The “loan by the little week,” as interpreted by Cerizet, is not, considering all things, so cruel a thing as the pawn-shop. Cerizet loaned ten francs Tuesday on condition of receiving twelve francs Sunday morning. In five weeks he doubled his capital; but he had to make many compromises. His kindness consisted in accepting, from time to time, eleven francs and fifty centimes; sometimes the whole interest was still owing. When he gave fifty francs for sixty to a fruit-stall man, or a hundred francs for one hundred and twenty to a seller of peat-fuel, he ran great risks.
On reaching the rue des Poules through the rue des Postes, Theodose and Dutocq saw a great assemblage of men and women, and by the light which the wine-merchant’s little oil-lamps cast upon these groups, they were horrified at beholding that mass of red, seamed, haggard faces; solemn with suffering, withered, distorted, swollen with wine, pallid from liquor; some threatening, others resigned, some sarcastic or jeering, others besotted; all rising from the midst of those terrible rags, which no designer can surpass in his most extravagant caricatures.
“I shall be recognized,” said Theodose, pulling Dutocq away; “we have done a foolish thing to come here at this hour and take him in the midst of his business.”
“All the more that Claparon may be sleeping in his lair, the interior of which we know nothing about. Yes, there are dangers for you, but none for me; I shall be thought to have business with my copying-clerk, and I’ll go and tell him to come and dine with us; this is court day, so we can’t have him to breakfast. I’ll tell him to meet us at the ‘Chaumiere’ in one of the garden dining-rooms.”
“Bad; anybody could listen to us there without being seen,” said la Peyrade. “I prefer the ‘Petit Rocher de Cancale’; we can go into a private room and speak low.”
“But suppose you are seen with Cerizet?”
“Well, then, let’s go to the ‘Cheval Rouge,’ quai de la Tournelle.”
“That’s best; seven o’clock; nobody will be there then.”
Dutocq advanced alone into the midst of that congress of beggars, and he heard his own name repeated from mouth to mouth, for he could hardly fail to encounter among them some jail-bird familiar with the judge’s office, just as Theodose was certain to have met a client.
In these quarters the justice-of-peace is the supreme authority; all legal contests stop short at his office, especially since the law was passed giving to those judges sovereign power in all cases of litigation involving not over one hundred and forty francs. A way was made for the judge’s clerk, who was not less feared than the judge himself. He saw women seated on the staircase; a horrible display of pallor and suffering of many kinds. Dutocq was almost asphyxiated when he opened the door of the room in which already sixty persons had left their odors.
“Your number? your number?” cried several voices.
“Hold your jaw!” cried a gruff voice from the street, “that’s the pen of the judge.”
Profound silence followed. Dutocq found his copying clerk clothed in a jacket of yellow leather like that of the gloves of the gendarmerie, beneath which he wore an ignoble waistcoat of knitted wool. The reader must imagine the man’s diseased head issuing from this species of scabbard and covered with a miserable Madras handkerchief, which, leaving to view the forehead and neck, gave to that head, by the gleam of a tallow candle of twelve to the pound, its naturally hideous and threatening character.
“It can’t be done that way, papa Lantimeche,” Cerizet was saying to a tall old man, seeming to be about seventy years of age, who was standing before him with a red woollen cap in his hand, exhibiting a bald head, and a breast covered with white hairs visible through his miserable linen jacket. “Tell me exactly what you want to undertake. One hundred francs, even on condition of getting back one hundred and twenty, can’t be let loose that way, like a dog in a church – ”
The five other applicants, among whom were two women, both with infants, one knitting, the other suckling her child, burst out laughing.
When Cerizet saw Dutocq, he rose respectfully and went rather hastily to meet him, adding to his client: —
“Take time to reflect; for, don’t you see? it makes me doubtful to have such a sum as that, one hundred francs! asked for by an old journeyman locksmith!”
“But I tell you it concerns an invention,” cried the old workman.
“An invention and one hundred francs!” said Dutocq. “You don’t know the laws; you must take out a patent, and that costs two thousand francs, and you want influence.”
“All that is true,” said Cerizet, who, however, reckoned a good deal on such chances. “Come to-morrow morning, papa Lantimeche, at six o’clock, and we’ll talk it over; you can’t talk inventions in public.”
Cerizet then turned to Dutocq whose first words were: —