He was delighted at the Revolution, was the ideal type of the Republican, a sort of Michel Chrestien of the fields; treated with cold disdain the Pichard family, who took from him the inheritance, to which he alone had any right; lived a life of poverty and sequestration; was none the less respected; was of Montcornet's party represented by Brossette; their opponent, Gregoire Rigou, felt for him both esteem and fear. Jean-Francois Niseron lost, one after another, his wife and his two children, and had by his side, in his old days, only Genevieve, natural daughter of his deceased son, Auguste. [The Peasantry.]
NISERON (Auguste), son of the preceding; soldier of the Republic and of the Empire; while an artilleryman in 1809, he seduced, at Zahara, a young Montenegrin, Zena Kropoli, who died, at Vincennes, early in the year 1810, leaving him an infant daughter. Thus he could not realize his purpose of marrying her. He himself was killed, before Montereau, during the year 1814, by the bursting of a shell. [The Peasantry.]
NISERON (Genevieve), natural daughter of the preceding and the Montenegrin woman, Zena Kropoli; born in 1810, and named Genevieve after a paternal aunt; an orphan from the age of four, she was reared in Bourgogne by her grandfather, Jean-Francois Niseron. She had her father's beauty and her mother's peculiarities. Her patronesses, Madame Montcornet and Madame de Michaud, bestowed upon her the surname Pechina, and, to guard her against Nicholas Tonsard's attentions, placed her in a convent at Auxerre, where she might acquire skill in sewing and forget Justin Michaud, whom she loved unconsciously. [The Peasantry.]
NOEL, book-keeper for Jean-Jules Popinot of Paris, in 1828, at the time that the judge questioned the Marquis d'Espard, whose wife tried to deprive him of the right to manage his property. [The Commission in Lunacy.]
NOSWELL (Mistress), a rich and eccentric Englishwoman, who was in Paris at the Hotel Lawson about the middle of Louis Philippe's reign; after much mental debate she bought of Fritot the shawl called Selim, which he said at first it was "impossible" for him to sell.
[Gaudissart II.]
NOUASTRE (Baron de), a refugee of the purest noble blood. A ruined man, he returned to Alencon in 1800, with his daughter, who was twenty-two years of age, and found a home with the Marquis d'Esgrignon, and died of grief two months later. Shortly afterwards the marquis married the orphan daughter. [Jealousies of a Country Town.]
NOURRISSON (Madame), was formerly, under the Empire, attached to the service of the Prince d'Ysembourg in Paris. The sight of the disorderly life of a "great lady" of the times decided Madame Nourrisson's profession. She set up shop as a dealer in old clothes, and was also known as mistress of various houses of shame. Intimate relations with Jacqueline Collin, continued for more than twenty years, made this two-fold business profitable. The two matrons willingly exchanged, at times, names and business signs, resources and profits. It was in the old clothes shop, on the rue Neuve-Saint-Marc, that Frederic de Nucingen bargained for Esther van Gobseck. Towards the end of Charles X.'s reign, one of Madame Nourrisson's establishments, on rue Saint-Barbe, was managed by La Gonore; in the time of Louis Philippe another--a secret affair--existed at the so-called "Pate des Italiens"; Valerie Marneffe and Wenceslas Steinbock were once caught there together. Madame Nourrisson, first of the name, evidently continued to conduct her business on the rue Saint-Marc, since, in 1845, she narrated the minutiae of it to Madame Mahuchet before an audience composed of the well-known trio, Bixiou, Lora and Gazonal, and related to them her own history, disclosing to them the secrets of her own long past beginnings in life. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life. Cousin Betty. The Unconscious Humorists.]
NOUVION (Comte de), a noble refugee, who had returned in utter poverty; chevalier of the Order of Saint-Louis; lived in Paris in 1828, subsisting on the delicately disguised charity of his friend, the Marquis d'Espard, who made him superintendent of the publication, at No. 22 rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, of the "Picturesque History of China," and offered him a share in the possible profits of the work. [The Commission in Lunacy.]
NOVERRE, a celebrated dancer, born in Paris 1727; died in 1807; was the rather unreliable customer of Chevrel the draper, father-in-law and predecessor of Guillaume at the Cat and Racket. [At the Sign of the Cat and Racket.]
