Yes, Rochette had come from nowhere—or rather, he had come from the country town of Melun, where he was a waiter in a greasy hotel; then he passed as clerk into a financial establishment; next he opened spacious offices of his own and successfully floated a dozen different companies. I believe the chief factor in Rochette’s success was the black beard he began to grow and to cultivate assiduously, elaborately, after his departure from Melun. With ambition, audacity and, above all, an ornamental black beard, no Frenchman should fail to make his fortune. Lemoine, the alchemist, Duez, the liquidator of the Religious Congregations, both of them had splendid black beards; and the first lived in great style, at the expense of even so astute a financier as Sir Julius Wernher, and the second kept up costly establishments on money belonging to the State. True, MM. Duez and Lemoine were shorn of their beards and sent to prison. But for a long while, at all events, a really fine black beard in France can excite admiration, inspire confidence, command capital and make millions. Well, Rochette fell with a crash—and so a panic, so ruin in Paris. Cases of suicide. Other cases of death from the shock. Bailiffs in possession of small homes and dim shops, and the small people expelled. Up with the shutters in Rochette’s splendid offices; away to prison with the swindling financier, and off with his beard. Victims and victims—dazed, broken, distracted. Amongst the forlornest victims, the two Mesdemoiselles Périvier. “Saintly creatures,” the stout, red-faced Curé of the church of St Sulpice used to say of the Mesdemoiselles Périvier. For years and years they had resided in his parish, attending a Low Mass and High Mass every morning, and Vespers every evening; for years and years they had subscribed to M. le Curé’s “good works,” and provided his favourite dishes of _vol-au-vent_ and _poulet-au-riz_ upon those monthly occasions when he dined with them in their dreary, six-roomed flat. It was the most sunless, the most joyless of homes; and the Mesdemoiselles Périvier were the frailest, the simplest, the most frugal of old spinsters, with scarcely a friend and not a relative in the world, and with no experience of the shocks and hardships of life until their small income was lost in the Rochette crash. Their eyes stained with tears, the two lonely sisters sought out M. le Curé. He consoled them as best he could; urged them to bear their loss with resignation; exhorted them to seek relief in prayer. And day after day, in shadowy St Sulpice, the Mesdemoiselles Périvier prayed long, earnestly, humbly. Never did a complaint escape them. But they looked frailer and lonelier than ever in their rusty black dresses, as they crossed themselves with holy water on their way out of St Sulpice to their sunless, stricken home.