Christopher Marteau was a warden of the corporation of Luthiers. He
dealt in musical instruments, as his father and grandfather had done
before him, at the sign of Saint Cecilia. With his wife, his only
child Phlipote, and Claude his apprentice, who was to marry Phlipote,
he occupied a good house of his own. Of course the disposition of
the young people, bred together from their childhood, does not at
first entirely concur with the parental arrangements. But the story
tells, reassuringly, how--to some extent how sadly--they came
heartily to do so. M. Marteau was no ordinary shopkeeper. The
various distinguished people who had fingered his clavecins, and
turned over the [140] folios of music, for half a century past, had
left their memories behind them; M. de Voltaire, for instance, who
had caressed the head of Phlipote with an aged, skeleton hand,
leaving, apparently, no very agreeable impression on the child,
though her father delighted to recall the incident, being himself a
demi-philosophe. He went to church, that is to say, only twice a
year, on the Feast of St. Cecilia and on the Sunday when the Luthiers
offered the pain benit. It was his opinion that everything in the
State needed reform except the Corporations.
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