It is making progress," as
though merely an ordinary enterprise was in question. No, in good truth,
there is only one Paris, where one can see such things. Positively it
makes your head turn sometimes. In a word, Moessard, one fine morning,
ceased coming to the office. He had succeeded, it appears, but the
Territorial Bank had not seemed to him a sufficiently advantageous
investment for the money of his mistress. Now, I ask you, was that
honest?

For that matter, the notion of honesty is lost so easily as hardly to
be believed. When I reflect that I, Passajon, with my white hair, my
venerable appearance, my so blameless past--thirty years of academical
services--am grown accustomed to living like a fish in the water, in the
midst of these infamies, this swindling! One might well ask what I am
doing here, why I remain, how I am come to this.

How I am come to it? Oh, _mon Dieu!_ very simply. Four years ago, my
wife being dead, my children married, I had just retired from my post
as hall-porter at the college, when an advertisement in the newspaper
chanced to meet my eye: "Wanted, an office-porter, middle-aged, at the
Territorial Bank, 56, Boulevard Malesherbes. Good references." Let me
confess it at the outset. The modern Babylon had always attracted me.
Then, too, I felt myself still a young man. I saw before me ten good
years during which I might earn a little money, a great deal, perhaps,
by means of investing my savings in the banking-house which I should
enter. So I wrote, inclosing my photograph, the one taken at Crespon's,
in the Market Place, which represents me with chin closely shaven, a
keen eye beneath my thick white eyebrows, my steel chain about my neck,
my ribbon as an academy official, "the air of a conscript father upon
his curule-chair," as M. Chalmette, our dean used to say. (He insisted
also that I much resembled the late King Louis XVIII; less strongly,
however.) I supplied, further, the best of references; the most
flattering recommendations from the gentlemen of the college. By return
of post, the governor replied that my appearance pleased him--I believe
it, _parbleu!_ an antechamber in the charge of a person with a striking
face like mine is a bait for the shareholder--and that I might come
when I liked. I ought, you may say to me, myself also to have made my
inquiries. Eh! no doubt. But I had to give so much information about
myself that it never occurred to me to ask for any about them. Beside