César Birotteau is the bourgeois epic of an honest man ruined, then rehabilitated by his probity. César Birotteau, a prosperous perfumer, deputy mayor, and freshly decorated with the Legion of Honor, is at the height of his success: to celebrate his decoration he gives a sumptuous ball that marks the apogee of his fortune. But, intoxicated by success and eager to rise still higher, he imprudently launches into a vast real-estate speculation around the Madeleine. Betrayed by his former clerk turned banker, the perfidious du Tillet who hates him and works in secret at his ruin, and victim of the flight of the crooked notary Roguin, Birotteau is dragged into bankruptcy. For this scrupulous merchant, attached to the honor of his name, insolvency is an unbearable moral disgrace. The rest of the novel is the heroic account of his struggle to recover: refusing to settle with his creditors, he devotes himself to repaying them in full, to the last sou, in order to cleanse his honor. He succeeds through relentless work and the devotion of his faithful associates, notably his clerk Anselme Popinot, whose commercial success — a hair oil — saves the situation and who marries his daughter Césarine. At the very moment when Birotteau, rehabilitated, sees his honor restored and his debt discharged, the emotion of triumph strikes him down: he dies of joy. Balzac celebrates commercial honesty and makes of bankruptcy and its repair a moral drama of rare intensity, transforming a perfumer into a tragic hero. Rich in detail on commerce, banking, and Parisian speculation, the novel is a hymn to bourgeois probity and a profound study of the feeling of honor.