Doubtless, notwithstanding my advanced age, I might have succeeded, by favor of my education, my general appearance and the care I have always taken of my clothes, in getting a place in some other office. There is a very honorable person of my acquaintance, M. Joyeuse, bookkeeper for Hemerlingue and Son, the great bankers on Rue Saint-Honore, who never fails to say to me whenever he meets me: "Passajon, my boy, don't stay in that den of thieves. You make a mistake in staying on there; you'll never get a sou out of it. Come to Hemerlingue's. I'll undertake to find some little corner for you. You will earn less, but you'll receive very much more." I feel that he is right, the honest fellow. But it's stronger than I am, I cannot make up my mind to go. And yet this is not a cheerful life that I lead here in these great cold rooms where no one ever comes, where every one slinks into a corner without speaking. What would you have? We know one another too well, that's the whole of it. Up to last year we had meetings of the council of supervision, meetings of stockholders, stormy, uproarious meetings, genuine battles of savages, whose yells could be heard at the Madeleine. And subscribers used to come too, several times a week, indignant because they had never heard anything from their money. Those were the times when our Governor came out strong. I have seen people go into his office, monsieur, as fierce as wolves thirsty for blood, and come out, after a quarter of an hour, milder than sheep, satisfied, reassured, and their pockets comforted with a few bank-notes. For there was the cunning of the thing: to ruin with money the poor wretches who came to demand it. To-day the shareholders of the _Caisse Territoriale_ never stir. I think that they are all dead or resigned to their fate. The council never meets. We have sessions only on paper; it is my duty to make up a so-called balance-sheet--always the same--of which I make a fresh copy every three months. We never see a living soul, except that at rare intervals some subscriber to the Paoli statue drops down on us from the wilds of Corsica, anxious to know if the monument is progressing; or perhaps some devout reader of the _Verite Financiere_, which disappeared more than two years ago, comes with an air of timidity to renew his subscription, and requests that it be forwarded a little more regularly, if possible. There is a confidence which nothing weakens. When one of those innocent creatures falls in the midst of our half-starved band, it is something terrible. We surround him, we embrace him, we try to get his name on one of our lists, and, in case he resists, if he will subscribe neither to the Paoli monument nor to the Corsican railways, then those gentry perform what they call--my pen blushes to write it--what they call "the drayman trick."