The name of Phileas, which may seem peculiar, is only one of the many oddities which we owe to the Revolution.Attached to the Simeuse family, and consequently, good Catholics, the Beauvisage father and mother desired to have their son baptized.The rector of Cinq-Cygne, the Abbe Goujet, whom they consulted, advised them to give their son for patron a saint whose Greek name might signify the municipality,--for the child was born at a period when children were inscribed on the civil registers under the fantastic names of the Republican calendar.
In 1814, hosiery, a stable business with few risks in ordinary times, was subject to all the variations in the price of cotton.This price depended at that time on the triumph or the defeat of the Emperor Napoleon, whose adversaries, the English generals, used to say in Spain: "The town is taken; now get out your bales."Pigoult, former patron of young Phileas, furnished the raw material to his workmen, who were scattered all over the country.At the time when he sold the business to Beauvisage junior, he possessed a large amount of raw cotton bought at a high price, whereas Lisbon was sending enormous quantities into the Empire at six sous the kilogramme, in virtue of the Emperor's celebrated decree.The reaction produced in France by the introduction of the Portuguese cotton caused the death of Pigoult, Achille's father, and began the fortune of Phileas, who, far from losing his head like his master, made his prices moderate by buying cotton cheaply and in doubling the quantity ventured upon by his predecessor.This simple system enabled Phileas to triple the manufacture and to pose as the benefactor of the workingmen; so that he was able to disperse his hosiery in Paris and all over France at a profit, when the luckiest of his competitors were only able to sell their goods at cost price.
At the beginning of 1814, Phileas had emptied his warerooms.The prospect of a war on French soil, the hardships of which were likely to press chiefly on Champagne, made him cautious.He manufactured nothing, and held himself ready to meet all events with his capital turned into gold.At this period the custom-house lines were no longer maintained.Napoleon could not do without his thirty thousand custom-house officers for service in the field.Cotton, then introduced through a thousand loopholes, slipped into the markets of France.No one can imagine how sly and how alert cotton had become at this epoch, nor with what eagerness the English laid hold of a country where cotton stockings sold for six francs a pair, and cambric shirts were objects of luxury.
Manufacturers from the second class, the principal workmen, reckoning on the genius of Napoleon, had bought up the cottons that came from Spain.They worked it up in hopes of being able later to give the law to the merchants of Paris.Phileas observed these facts.When the war ravaged Champagne, he kept himself between the French army and Paris.
After each lost battle he went among the workmen who had buried their products in casks,--a sort of silo of hosiery,--then, gold in hand, this Cossack of weaving bought up, from village to village, below the cost of fabrication, tons of merchandise which might otherwise become at any time a prey to an enemy whose feet were as much in need of being socked as its throat of being moistened.
