y will be there then."

Dutocq advanced alone into the midst of that congress of beggars, and
he heard his own name repeated from mouth to mouth, for he could hardly
fail to encounter among them some jail-bird familiar with the judge's
office, just as Theodose was certain to have met a client.

In these quarters the justice-of-peace is the supreme authority; all
legal contests stop short at his office, especially since the law was
passed giving to those judges sovereign power in all cases of litigation
involving not over one hundred and forty francs. A way was made for the
judge's clerk, who was not less feared than the judge himself. He
saw women seated on the staircase; a horrible display of pallor and
suffering of many kinds. Dutocq was almost asphyxiated when he opened
the door of the room in which already sixty persons had left their
odors.

"Your number? your number?" cried several voices.

"Hold your jaw!" cried a gruff voice from the street, "that's the pen of
the judge."

Profound silence followed. Dutocq found his copying clerk clothed in
a jacket of yellow leather like that of the gloves of the gendarmerie,
beneath which he wore an ignoble waistcoat of knitted wool. The reader
must imagine the man's diseased head issuing from this species of
scabbard and covered with a miserable Madras handkerchief, which,
leaving to view the forehead and neck, gave to that head, by the gleam
of a tallow candle of twelve to the pound, its naturally hideous and
threatening character.

"It can't be done that way, papa Lantimeche," Cerizet was saying to a
tall old man, seeming to be about seventy years of age, who was standing
before him with a red woollen cap in his hand, exhibiting a bald head,
and a breast covered with white hairs visible through his miserable
linen jacket. "Tell me exactly what you want to undertake. One hundred
francs, even on condition of getting back one hundred and twenty, can't
be let loose that way, like a dog in a church--"

The five other applicants, among whom were two women, both with infants,
one knitting, the other suckling her child, burst out laughing.

When Cerizet saw Dutocq, he rose respectfully and went rather hastily to
meet him, adding to his client:--

"Take time to reflect; for, don't you see? it makes me doubtful to have
such a sum as that, one hundred francs! asked for by an old journeyman
locksmith!"

"But I tell you it concerns an invention," cried the old workman.

"A