s of the past, I may say I saw him again, I
saw him with great vividness of recollection, as he appeared in the days
of his glory or splendour. No! Neither of these words will fit his
success. There was never any glory or splendour about that figure.
Well, let us say in the days when he was, according to the majority of
the daily press, a financial force working for the improvement of the
character of the people. I'll tell you how it came about."

At that time I used to know a podgy, wealthy, bald little man having
chambers in the Albany; a financier too, in his way, carrying out
transactions of an intimate nature and of no moral character; mostly
with young men of birth and expectations--though I dare say he didn't
withhold his ministrations from elderly plebeians either. He was a true
democrat; he would have done business (a sharp kind of business) with
the devil himself. Everything was fly that came into his web. He
received the applicants in an alert, jovial fashion which was quite
surprising. It gave relief without giving too much confidence, which
was just as well perhaps. His business was transacted in an apartment
furnished like a drawing-room, the walls hung with several brown,
heavily-framed, oil paintings. I don't know if they were good, but they
were big, and with their elaborate, tarnished gilt-frames had a
melancholy dignity. The man himself sat at a shining, inlaid writing
table which looked like a rare piece from a museum of art; his chair had
a high, oval, carved back, upholstered in faded tapestry; and these
objects made of the costly black Havana cigar, which he rolled
incessantly from the middle to the left corner of his mouth and back
again, an inexpressibly cheap and nasty object. I had to see him
several times in the interest of a poor devil so unlucky that he didn't
even have a more competent friend than myself to speak for him at a very
difficult time in his life.

I don't know at what hour my private financier began his day, but he
used to give one appointments at unheard of times: such as a quarter to
eight in the morning, for instance. On arriving one found him busy at
that marvellous writing table, looking very fresh and alert, exhaling a
faint fragrance of scented soap and with the cigar already well alight.
You may believe that I entered on my mission with many unpleasant
forebodings; but there was in that fat, admirably washed, little man
such a profound contempt for mankind