ols, institutions and moral systems, all
human rules and regulations, great and small, will, one after another,
present much the same face that an intimate friend turns upon you when
you ask him to lend you a thousand francs. With a dolorous dropping of
the jaw, they indicate the guillotine, much as your friend aforesaid
will furnish you with the address of the money-lender, pointing you to
one of the hundred gates by which a man comes to the last refuge of the
destitute.

Yet nature has her freaks in the making of a man's mind; she indulges
herself and makes a few honest folk now and again, and now and then a
cashier.

Wherefore, that race of corsairs whom we dignify with the title of
bankers, the gentry who take out a license for which they pay a thousand
crowns, as the privateer takes out his letters of marque, hold these
rare products of the incubations of virtue in such esteem that they
confine them in cages in their counting-houses, much as governments
procure and maintain specimens of strange beasts at their own charges.

If the cashier is possessed of an imagination or of a fervid
temperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete cashier,
he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has ambitions,
or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is undone.
Search the chronicles of the counting-house. You will not find a single
instance of a cashier attaining _a position_, as it is called. They are
sent to the hulks; they go to foreign parts; they vegetate on a second
floor in the Rue Saint-Louis among the market gardens of the Marais.
Some day, when the cashiers of Paris come to a sense of their real
value, a cashier will be hardly obtainable for money. Still, certain
it is that there are people who are fit for nothing but to be cashiers,
just as the bent of a certain order of mind inevitably makes for
rascality. But, oh marvel of our civilization! Society rewards virtue
with an income of a hundred louis in old age, a dwelling on a second
floor, bread sufficient, occasional new bandana handkerchiefs, an
elderly wife and her offspring.

So much for virtue. But for the opposite course, a little boldness,
a faculty for keeping on the windward side of the law, as Turenne
outflanked Montecuculi, and Society will sanction the theft of millions,
shower ribbons upon the thief, cram him with honors, and smother him
with consideration.

Government, moreover, works harmoniously with this