“Suppose that a M. Barnabé comes and asks me for a drawing-room chandelier. I say, ‘Right! I see what you want’; and I jump into a taxi. I get to Messrs. Cohen’s. ‘It’s 25 per cent. commission. Is that understood?’ Let us imagine that Cohen makes difficulties. Right! I run downstairs, jump into the taxi again, and go to Smithson’s.... Certainly it can be an expensive game. Supposing that Barnabé goes back on me--well, then, I am left with the taxi to pay for.... But it’s interesting! It’s a trade that keeps you going; it amuses you; you need to have discrimination.” Looking at the animated face of Cousin, I smiled. His cheeks were like imitation marble, not very good; he had the swollen eyes of a man who had lain too long in bed with fever, and whose “inside” was not very healthy. At forty one may feel one’s heart young, but one’s flesh does not react from the effects of a torpedo as it does at twenty. I looked at the legless Cousin with astonishment while he explained to me how, in his trade, one rushed upstairs at Cohen’s; how one jumped about at Marguillé’s; how one ran down Smithson’s stairs. A day came when Cousin’s leg began to bleed. The blood filtered through the bandage in great drops, like scarlet sweat, or like morning dew on the leaves of a cabbage. During four or five days Cousin’s wound bled nearly every day. Every time he was carried away in haste; they put all sorts of things into his wound, and the blood ceased to flow. Every time Cousin came back to his bed a little paler, and he said to me as he passed: “There, you see ... one never gets any peace.” One morning I went to sit beside Cousin, who was making his toilette. He was out of breath. In spite of the puffiness of his face, one felt it had grown thin, formless, devoured by an internal malady. Really, it reminded one of a fruit rotten with vermin. “I have,” he told me, “good news of my boys--twelve and thirteen years old. They’re getting on! Didn’t I tell you? I am thinking of taking on, as well as the candelabras, clocks and chimneypieces. With the connection that I have, I mean to do great things. One must always aim high. _Dame!_ I shall have to get a move on. But I’ll manage, I’ll manage. What one needs is to know the styles....” I tried to smile, without being able to control a contraction of the heart. Cousin seemed uplifted by a sort of lyrical ecstasy. He brandished his towel in one hand, and his soap in the other. He described his great future career as if he saw it spread out, written in big letters on the whiteness of the sheets. On the sheet, which I was just looking at, there appeared suddenly a blot--a red blot which enlarged itself rapidly into a terrifying and splendid stain. “Oh, dear!” murmured Cousin, “it’s bleeding again. One never gets any peace.” I had called for help. A waterproof sheet was folded round Cousin’s thigh. He said, “It’s all right; it’s all right. No need to worry.”