The principal tenant is, in Paris, to the owners of houses what farmers are to country landlords.

All Paris has seen one of its great tailors, building at his own cost, on the famous site of Frascati, one of the most sumptuous of houses, and paying, as principal tenant, fifty thousand francs a year for the ground rent of the house, which, at the end of nineteen years' lease, was to become the property of the owner of the land.

In spite of the costs of construction, which were something like seven hundred thousand francs, the profits of those nineteen years proved, in the end, very large.
Cerizet, always on the watch for business, had examined the chances for gain offered by the situation of the house which Thuillier had _stolen_,--as he said to Desroches,--and he had seen the possibility of letting it for sixty thousand at the end of six years.

There were four shops, two on each side, for it stood on a boulevard corner.

Cerizet expected, therefore, to get clear ten thousand a year for a dozen years, allowing for eventualities and sundries attendant on renewal of leases.
He therefore proposed to himself to sell his money-lending business to the widow Poiret and Cadenet for ten thousand francs; he already possessed thirty thousand; and the two together would enable him to pay the last year's rent in advance, which house-owners in Paris usually demand as a guarantee from a principal tenant on a long lease.