The Lesser Bourgeoisie | Page 9

to their midst a household which had hitherto been
quasi-collateral to them.
It was that of Monsieur Colleville, an intimate friend of Thuillier. But
before we proceed to describe Pylades let us finish with Orestes, and
explain why Thuillier--that handsome Thuillier--was left without a
family of his own--for the family, be it said, is non-existent without
children. Herein appears one of those deep mysteries which lie buried
in the arena of private life, a few shreds of which rise to the surface at
moments when the pain of a concealed situation grows poignant. This
concerns the life of Madame and Mademoiselle Thuillier; so far, we
have seen only the life (and we may call it the public life) of Jerome
Thuillier.

Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier, four years older than her brother, had
been utterly sacrificed to him; it was easier to give a career to one than
a "dot" to the other. Misfortune to some natures is a pharos, which
illumines to their eyes the dark low corners of social existence.
Superior to her brother both in mind and energy, Brigitte had one of
those natures which, under the hammer of persecution, gather
themselves together, become compact and powerfully resistant, not to
say inflexible. Jealous of her independence, she kept aloof from the life
of the household; choosing to make herself the sole arbiter of her own
fate. At fourteen years of age, she went to live alone in a garret, not far
from the ministry of finance, which was then in the rue Vivienne, and
also not far from the Bank of France, then, and now, in the rue de la
Vrilliere. There she bravely gave herself up to a form of industry little
known and the perquisite of a few persons, which she obtained, thanks
to the patrons of her father. It consisted in making bags to hold coin for
the Bank, the Treasury, and the great financial houses. At the end of
three years she employed two workwomen. By investing her savings on
the Grand-Livre, she found herself, in 1814, the mistress of three
thousand six hundred francs a year, earned in fifteen years. As she
spent little, and dined with her father as long as he lived, and, as
government securities were very low during the last convulsions of the
Empire, this result, which seems at first sight exaggerated, explains
itself.
On the death of their father, Brigitte and Jerome, the former being
twenty-seven, the latter twenty-three, united their existence. Brother
and sister were bound together by an extreme affection. If Jerome, then
at the height of his success, was pinched for money, his sister, clothed
in serge, and her fingers roughened by the coarse thread with which she
sewed her bags, would give him a few louis. In Brigitte's eyes Jerome
was the handsomest and most charming man in the whole French
Empire. To keep house for this cherished brother, to be initiated into
the secrets of Lindor and Don Juan, to be his handmaiden, his spaniel,
was Brigitte's dream. She immolated herself lovingly to an idol whose
selfishness, always great, was enormously increased by her
self-sacrifice. She sold her business to her fore- woman for fifteen
thousand francs and came to live with Thuillier in the rue d'Argenteuil,

where she made herself the mother, protectress, and servant of this
spoiled child of women. Brigitte, with the natural caution of a girl who
owed everything to her own discretion and her own labor, concealed
the amount of her savings from Jerome,--fearing, no doubt, the
extravagance of a man of gallantry. She merely paid a quota of six
hundred francs a year to the expenses of the household, and this, with
her brother's eighteen hundred, enabled her to make both ends meet at
the end of the year.
From the first days of their coming together, Thuillier listened to his
sister as to an oracle; he consulted her in his trifling affairs, kept none
of his secrets from her, and thus made her taste the fruit of despotism
which was, in truth, the one little sin of her nature. But the sister had
sacrificed everything to the brother; she had staked her all upon his
heart; she lived by him only. Brigitte's ascendancy over Jerome was
singularly proved by the marriage which she procured for him about the
year 1814.
Seeing the tendency to enforced reduction which the new-comers to
power under the Restoration were beginning to bring about in the
government offices, and particularly since the return of the old society
which sought to ride over the bourgeoisie, Brigitte understood, far
better than her brother could explain it to her, the social crisis which
presently extinguished their common hopes. No more successes for that
handsome Thuillier in the salons of the nobles who now succeeded the
plebeians of the