Here is what it is: We always keep at the office a parcel prepared in advance, a well-corded case which arrives nominally from the railway station while the visitor is present. “There are twenty francs carriage to pay,” says the one among us who brings the thing in. (Twenty francs, sometimes thirty, according to the appearance of the patient.) Every one then begins to ransack his pockets: “Twenty francs carriage! but I haven’t got it.” “Nor I either. What a nuisance!” Some one runs to the cash-till. Closed. The cashier is summoned. He is out. And the gruff voice of the drayman, growing impatient in the antechamber: “Come, come, make haste.” (It is generally I who play the drayman, because of the strength of my vocal organs.) What is to be done now? Return the parcel? That will vex the governor. “Gentlemen, I beg, will you permit me,” ventures the innocent victim, opening his purse. “Ah, monsieur, indeed--” He hands over his twenty francs, he is ushered to the door, and, as soon as his heel is turned, we all divide the fruit of the crime, laughing like highway robbers. Fie! M. Passajon. At your age, such a trade! Eh! _mon Dieu!_ I well know it. I know that I should do myself more honour in quitting this evil place. But what! You would have me then renounce the hope of getting back anything of all I have put in here. No, it is not possible. There is urgent need on the contrary that I should remain, that I should be on the watch, always at hand, ready to profit by any windfall, if one should come. Oh, for example, I swear it upon my ribbon, upon my thirty years of academical service, if ever an affair like this of the Nabob allow me to recover my disbursements, I shall not wait another single minute. I shall quickly be off to look after my pretty vineyard down yonder, near Monbars, cured forever of my thoughts of speculation. But, alas! that is a very chimerical hope. Exhausted, used up, known as we are upon the Paris market, with our stocks which are no longer quoted on the Bourse, our bonds which are near being waste paper, so many lies, so many debts, and the hole that grows ever deeper and deeper. (We owe at this moment three million five hundred thousand francs. It is not, however, those three millions that worry us. On the contrary, it is they that keep us going; but we have with the _concierge_ a little bill of a hundred and twenty-five francs for postage-stamps, a month’s gas bill, and other little things. That is the really terrible part of it.) and we are expected to believe that a man, a great financier like this Nabob, even though he were just arrived from the Congo, or dropped from the moon the same day, would be fool enough to put his money into a concern like this. Come! Is the thing possible? You may tell that story to the marines, my dear governor. A DEBUT IN SOCIETY “M. BERNARD JANSOULET!”