Sylvie was placed as an apprentice, with a premium of a hundred crowns for her board, with some tradespeople in the Rue Saint-Denis, natives of Provins. Two years later she was paying her way; though she earned no money, her parents had nothing to pay for her food and lodging. This, in the Rue Saint-Denis, is called being “at par.” Two years later Sylvie was earning a hundred crowns a year. In the course of that time her mother had sent her a hundred francs for pocket-money. Thus, at the age of nineteen, Mademoiselle Sylvie Rogron was independent. When she was twenty, she was second “young lady” in the house of Julliard, raw silk merchants, at the sign of the Ver chinois (or Silkworm), in the Rue Saint-Denis.
The history of the brother was like the sister’s. Little Jérôme-Denis Rogron was placed with one of the largest wholesale mercers in the Rue Saint-Denis, the maison Guépin, at the Trois Quenouilles. While Sylvie, at twenty-one, was forewoman with a thousand francs a year, Jérôme-Denis, better served by luck, was, at eighteen, head shop-clerk, earning twelve hundred, with the Guépins, also natives of Provins. The brother and sister met every Sunday and holiday, and spent the day in cheap amusements. They dined outside Paris; they went to Saint-Cloud, Meudon, Belleville, or Vincennes.
At the end of 1815 they united the money they had earned by the sweat of their brow, and bought of Madame Guenée the business and goodwill of a famous house, the Soeur de famille, one of the best known retail haberdashers. The sister kept the cash, the shop, and the accounts; the brother was both buyer and head-clerk, as Sylvie was for some time her own forewoman. In 1821, after five years’ hard work, competition had become so lively in the haberdashery business that the brother and sister had scarcely been able to pay off the purchase money and keep up the reputation of the house.
Though Sylvie Rogron was at this time but forty, her ugliness, her constant toil, and a peculiarly crabbed expression, arising as much from the shape of her features as from her anxieties, made her look like a woman of fifty. Jérôme-Denis Rogron, at the age of thirty-eight, had the most idiotic face that ever bent over a counter to a customer. His low forehead, crushed by fatigue, was seamed by three arid furrows. His scanty gray hair, cut very short, suggested the unutterable stupidity of a cold-blooded animal; in the gaze of his blue-gray eyes there was neither fire nor mind. His round, flat face aroused no sympathy, and did not even bring a smile to the lips of those who study the varieties of Parisian physiognomy; it was depressing. And while, like his father, he was short and thick, his shape, not having the coarse obesity of the innkeeper, showed in every detail an absurd flabbiness. His father’s excessive redness gave place in him to the flaccid lividness acquired by people who live in airless backshops, in the barred coops that serve as countinghouses, always folding and unfolding skeins of thread, paying or receiving money, harrying clerks, or repeating the same phrases to customers. The small intelligence of this brother and sister had been completely sunk in mastering their business, in debit and credit, and in the study of the rules and customs of the Paris market. Thread, needles, ribbon, pins, buttons, tailors’ trimmings, in short, the vast list of articles constituting Paris haberdashery, had filled up their memory. Letters to write and answer, bills and stocktaking, had absorbed all their capabilities.
Outside their line of business they knew absolutely nothing; they did not even know Paris. To them Paris was something spread out round the Rue Saint-Denis. Their narrow nature found its field in their shop. They knew very well how to nag their assistants and shopgirls and find them at fault. Their joy consisted in seeing all their hands as busy on the counters as mice’s paws, handling the goods or folding up the pieces. When they heard seven or eight young voices of lads and girls simpering out the time-honored phrases with which shop-assistants reply to a customer’s remarks, it was a fine day, nice weather. When ethereal blue brought life to Paris, and Parisians out walking thought of no haberdashery but what they wore, “Bad weather for business,” the silly master would observe. The great secret, which made Rogron the object of his apprentices’ admiration, was his art in tying, untying, re-tying, and making up a parcel. Rogron could pack a parcel and look out at what was going on in the street, or keep an eye on his shop to its furthest depths; he had seen everything by the time he handed it to the buyer, saying, “Madame—nothing more this morning?”
But for his sister, this simpleton would have been ruined. Sylvie had good sense and the spirit of trade. She advised her brother as to his purchases from the manufacturers, and relentlessly sent him off to the other end of France to make a sou of profit on some article. The shrewdness, of which every woman possesses more or less, having no duty to do for her heart, she had utilized it in speculation. Stock to be paid for! this thought was the piston that worked this machine and gave it appalling energy. Rogron
