Pichon & Sons, of the Croix Rousse

"Pichon & Sons, of the Croix Rousse" is a novel by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu that delves into themes of family dynamics, betrayal, and the complexities of human relationships. Set against the backdrop of the Croix Rousse district in Lyon, France, the story follows the Pichon family, who run a successful business but grapple with internal strife and external pressures. Le Fanu's narrative explores the moral dilemmas faced by the characters, illuminating their struggles and aspirations while weaving a tale rich in psychological depth and social commentary. The book highlights the intricate interplay of personal and professional lives, ultimately revealing the fragility of trust and the enduring impact of choices made.

• Horror

								
Giraudier, pharmacien, première 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 terre 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 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
favor, 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 Créme de Roses, ensuing naturally on the narration of
the history of Pichon & Sons. Giraudier is not of aristocratic
principles and sympathies; on the contrary, he has decided republican
leanings, and considers Le Progrès 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 Bonaparte," 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.

The Marquis de Sénanges, in the days of the triumph of the great
Revolution, was fortunate enough to be out of France, and wise enough to
remain away from that country, though he persisted, long after the old
régime was as dead as the Ptolemies, in believing it merely suspended,
and the Revolution a lamentable accident of vulgar complexion, but
happily temporary duration. The Marquis de Sénanges, who affected the
style régence, and was the politest of infidels and the most refined
of voluptuaries, got on indifferently in inappreciative foreign parts;
but the members of his family--his brother and sisters, two of whom were
guillotined, while the third escaped to Savoy and found refuge there in
a convent of her order--got on exceedingly ill in France. If the
ci-devant Marquis had had plenty of money to expend in such feeble
imitations of his accustomed pleasures as were to be had out of Paris,
he would not have been much affected by the fate of his relatives. But
money became exceedingly scarce; the Marquis had actually beheld many of
his peers reduced to the necessity of earning the despicable but
indispensable article after many ludicrous fashions. And the duration of
this absurd upsetting of law, order, privilege, and property began to
assume unexpected and very unpleasant proportions.

The Château de Sénanges, with its surrounding lands, was confiscated to
the Nation, during the third year of the "emigration" of the Marquis de
Sénanges; and the greater part of the estate was purchased by a thrifty,
industrious, and rich avocat, named Prosper Alix, a widower with an
only daughter. Prosper Alix enjoyed the esteem of the entire
neighborhood. First, he was rich; secondly, he was of a taciturn
disposition, and of a neutral tint in politics. He had done well under
the old régime and, he was doing well under the new--thank God, or the
Supreme Being, or the First Cause, or the goddess Reason herself, for
all;--he would have invoked Dagon, Moloch, or Kali, quite as readily as
the Saints and the Madonna, who has gone so utterly out of fashion of
late. Nobody was afraid to speak out before Prosper Alix; he was not a
spy; and though a cold-hearted man, except in the instance of his only
daughter, he never harmed anybody.

Very likely it was because he was the last person in the vicinity whom
anybody would have suspected of being applied to by the dispossessed
family, that the son of the Marquis' brother, a young man of promise, of
courage, of intellect, and of morals of decidedly a higher calibre than
those actually and traditionally imputed to the family, sought the aid
of the new possessor of the Château de Sénanges, which had changed its
old title for that of the Maison Alix. The father of M. Paul de Sénanges
had perished in the September massacres; his mother had been guillotined
at Lyons; and he--who had been saved by the interposition of a young
comrade, whose father had, in the wonderful rotations of the wheel of
Fate, acquired authority in the place where he had once esteemed the
notice of the nephew of the Marquis a crowning honor for his son--had
passed through the common vicissitudes of that dreadful time, which
would take a volume for their recital in each individual instance.

Paul de Sénanges was a handsome young fellow, frank, high-spirited, and
of a brisk and happy temperament; which, however, modified by the many
misfortunes he had undergone, was not permanently changed. He had plenty
of capacity for enjoyment in him still; and as his position was very
isolated, and his mind had become enlightened on social and political
matters to an extent in which the men of his family would have
discovered utter degradation and the women diabolical possession, he
would not have been very unhappy if, under the new condition of things,
he could have lived in his native country and gained an honest
livelihood. But he could not do that, he was too thoroughly "suspect;"
the antecedents of his family were too powerful against him: his only
chance would have been to have gone into the popular camp as an extreme,
violent partisan, to have out-Heroded the revolutionary Herods; and that
Paul de Sénanges was too honest to do. So he was reduced to being
thankful that he had escaped with his life, and to watching for an
opportunity of leaving France and gaining some country where the reign
of liberty, fraternity, and equality was not quite so oppressive.

The long-looked-for opportunity at length offered itself, and Paul de
Sénanges was instructed by his uncle the Marquis that he must contrive

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