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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.