The Village Rector | Page 4

shop, a worm-eaten wooden staircase led to
the two upper floors which were in turn surmounted by an attic. The
house, backing against two adjoining houses, had no depth and derived
all its light from the front and side windows. Each floor had two small
chambers only, lighted by single windows, one looking out on the rue
de la Cite, the other on the rue de la Vieille-Poste.
In the middle-ages no artisan was better lodged. The house had
evidently belonged in those times to makers of halberds and battle-
axes, armorers in short, artificers whose work was not injured by
exposure to the open air; for it was impossible to see clearly within,
unless the iron shutters were raised from each side of the building;

where were also two doors, one on either side of the corner pillar, as
may be seen in many shops at the corners of streets. From the sill of
each door--of fine stone worn by the tread of centuries--a low wall
about three feet high began; in this wall was a groove or slot, repeated
above in the beam by which the wall of each facade was supported.
From time immemorial the heavy shutters had been rolled along these
grooves, held there by enormous iron bars, while the doors were closed
and secured in the same manner; so that these merchants and artificers
could bar themselves into their houses as into a fortress.
Examining the interior, which, during the first twenty years of this
century, was encumbered with old iron and brass, tires of wheels,
springs, bells, anything in short which the destruction of buildings
afforded of old metals, persons interested in the relics of the old town
noticed signs of the flue of a forge, shown by a long trail of soot,--a
minor detail which confirmed the conjecture of archaeologists as to the
original use to which the building was put. On the first floor (above the
ground-floor) was one room and the kitchen; on the floor above that
were two bedrooms. The garret was used to put away articles more
choice and delicate than those that lay pell-mell about the shop.
This house, hired in the first instance, was subsequently bought by a
man named Sauviat, a hawker or peddler who, from 1786 to 1793,
travelled the country over a radius of a hundred and fifty miles around
Auvergne, exchanging crockery of a common kind, plates, dishes,
glasses,--in short, the necessary articles of the poorest households, --for
old iron, brass, and lead, or any metal under any shape it might lurk in.
The Auvergnat would give, for instance, a brown earthenware saucepan
worth two sous for a pound of lead, two pounds of iron, a broken spade
or hoe or a cracked kettle; and being invariably the judge of his own
cause, he did the weighing.
At the close of his third year Sauviat added the hawking of tin and
copper ware to that of his pottery. In 1793 he was able to buy a chateau
sold as part of the National domain, which he at once pulled to pieces.
The profits were such that he repeated the process at several points of
the sphere in which he operated; later, these first successful essays gave
him the idea of proposing something of a like nature on a larger scale to
one of his compatriots who lived in Paris. Thus it happened that the
"Bande Noire," so celebrated for its devastations, had its birth in the

brain of old Sauviat, the peddler, whom all Limoges afterward saw and
knew for twenty-seven years in the rickety old shop among his cracked
bells and rusty bars, chains and scales, his twisted leaden gutters, and
metal rubbish of all kinds. We must do him the justice to say that he
knew nothing of the celebrity or the extent of the association he
originated; he profited by his own idea only in proportion to the capital
he entrusted to the since famous firm of Bresac.
Tired of frequenting fairs and roaming the country, the Auvergnat
settled at Limoges, where he married, in 1797, the daughter of a
coppersmith, a widower, named Champagnac. When his father-in-law
died he bought the house in which he had been carrying on his trade of
old- iron dealer, after ceasing to roam the country as a peddler. Sauviat
was fifty years of age when he married old Champagnac's daughter,
who was herself not less than thirty. Neither handsome nor pretty, she
was nevertheless born in Auvergne, and the /patois/ seemed to be the
mutual attraction; also she had the sturdy frame which enables women
to bear hard work. In the first three years of their married life Sauviat
continued to do some peddling, and his wife accompanied him,
carrying iron or lead on her