Pichon & Sons, of the Croix Rousse

Giraudier, _pharmacien, premiere classe_, is the legend, recorded in huge, ill-proportioned letters, which directs the attention of the stranger to the most prosperous-looking shop in the grand _place_ of La Croix Rousse, a well-known suburb of the beautiful city of Lyons, which has its share of the shabby gentility and poor pretence common to the suburban commerce of great towns.

Giraudier is not only _pharmacien_ but _propriétaire_, though not by inheritance; his possession of one of the prettiest and most prolific of the small vineyards in the beautiful suburb, and a charming inconvenient house, with low ceilings, liliputian bedrooms, and a profusion of _persiennes, jalousies_, and _contrevents_, comes by purchase. This enviable little terse was sold by the Nation, when that terrible abstraction transacted the public business of France; and it was bought very cheaply by the strong-minded father of the Giraudier of the present, who was not disturbed by the evil reputation which the place had gained, at a time when the peasants of France, having been bullied into a renunciation of religion, eagerly cherished superstition. The Giraudier of the present cherishes the particular superstition in question affectionately; it reminds him of an uncommonly good bargain made in his favour, which is always a pleasant association of ideas, especially to a Frenchman still more especially to a Lyonnais; and it attracts strangers to his _pharmacie_, and leads to transactions in _Grand Chartreuse_ and _Creme de Roses_, ensuing naturally on the narration of the history of Pichon and Sons. Giraudier is not of aristocratic principles and sympathies; on the contrary, he has decided republican leanings, and considers _Le Progres_ a masterpiece of journalistic literature; but, as he says simply and strongly, 'it is not because a man is a marquis that one is not to keep faith with him; a bad action is not good because it harms a good-for-nothing of a noble; the more when that good-for-nothing is no longer a noble, but _pour rire_'. At the easy price of acquiescence in these sentiments, the stranger hears one of the most authentic, best-remembered, most popular of the many traditions of the bad old times before General Buonaparte', as Giraudier, who has no sympathy with any later designation of _le grand homme_, calls the Emperor, whose statue one can perceive--a speck in the distance--from the threshold of the _pharmacie_.