their blouses, never refused to shake hands with a workman, and returned home covered with plaster dust. They came from Langres both of them, and into this burning, never satisfied Paris they brought their Champagnese prudence, their calm brains, somewhat obtuse and deficient in intelligence, but very quick in profiting of opportunities for filling their pockets, free to enjoy themselves later on. If Saccard promoted the affair and infused life into it with his fire and rageous appetite, Messieurs Mignon & Charrier by their plodding habits, their narrow methodical management, prevented it a score of times from being capsized by the astonishing imagination of their partner. They would never consent to have superb offices in a mansion which he wanted to build to astonish Paris. They also refused to entertain the secondary speculations which sprouted in his brain every morning, such as the erection of concert halls and vast bathing establishments on the building ground bordering their thoroughfare; of covered galleries, which would have doubled the rent of the shops and have allowed people to circulate through Paris without getting wet. To put a stop to these plans, which frightened them, the contractors decided that the building ground should be divided between the three partners, and that each should do what he pleased with his share. They themselves wisely continued selling their lots while he built upon his. His brain boiled. He would, in all seriousness, have proposed placing Paris under a huge bell-glass to change it into a conservatory and grow pine apples and sugar cane there. Turning over money by the shovelful he soon had eight houses on the new boulevards. He had four that were completely finished, two in the Rue de Marignan, and two on the Boulevard Haussmann; the four others, situated on the Boulevard Malesherbes, remained in progress, and indeed one of them, a vast enclosure of planks where a magnificent mansion was to rise, had only the flooring of the first floor laid. At this period his affairs became so complicated, he had so many strings attached to each of his fingers, so many interests to watch over and puppets to set in motion, that he slept barely three hours a night and read his correspondence in his carriage. The marvellous thing was that his cash-box seemed inexhaustible. He was a shareholder in every company, built houses with a kind of fury, turned himself to every trade and threatened to inundate Paris like a rising tide, without once being seen to realise a clear profit or pocket a large sum shining in the sunlight. The river of gold, of unknown source, which seemed to flow from his study in quickly recurring waves, astonished the Parisian cockneys, and at one moment made him the prominent man to whom the newspapers ascribed all the witticisms of the Bourse.