master.
I took my old seat and den as managing clerk between the outer office
and Counsellor Boule's glass cage. I correct the drafts of the inferior
clerks; I see the clients and instruct them how to proceed. They often
take me for the counsellor himself. I go to the courts nearly every day,
and hang about chief clerks' and judges' chambers; and go to the theatre
once a week with the "paper" supplied to the office.

Do I call this a profession? No, merely a stop-gap which allows me to
live and wait for something to turn up. I sometimes have forebodings
that I shall go on like this forever, waiting for something which
will never turn up; that this temporary occupation may become only too
permanent.

There is an old clerk in the office who has never had any other
occupation, whose appearance is a kind of warning to me. He has a red
face--the effect of the office stove, I think--straight, white hair,
the expression when spoken to of a startled sheep-gentle, astonished,
slightly flurried. His attenuated back is rounded off with a stoop
between the neck and shoulders. He can hardly keep his hands from
shaking. His signature is a work of art. He can stick at his desk for
six hours without stirring. While we lunch at a restaurant, he consumes
at the office some nondescript provisions which he brings in the morning
in a paper bag. On Sundays he fishes, for a change; his rod takes the
place of his pen, and his can of worms serves instead of inkstand.

He and I have already one point of resemblance. The old clerk was once
crossed in love with a flowergirl, one Mademoiselle Elodie. He has told
me this one tragedy of his life. In days gone by I used to think this
thirty-year-old love-story dull and commonplace; to-day I understand
M. Jupille; I relish him even. He and I have become sympathetic. I no
longer make him move from his seat by the fire when I want to ask him a
question: I go to him. On Sundays, on the quays by the Seine, I pick him
out from the crowd intent upon the capture of tittlebats, because he is
seated upon his handkerchief. I go up to him and we have a talk.

"Fish biting, Monsieur Jupille?"

"Hardly at all."

"Sport is not what it used to be?"

"Ah! Monsieur Mouillard, if you could have seen it thirty years ago!"

This date is always cropping up with him. Have we not all our own date,
a few months, a few days, perhaps a single hour of full-hearted joy, for
which half our life has been a preparation, and