ellent repute known to me, M. Joyeuse, a bookkeeper in the
firm of Hemerlingue & Son, the great bankers of the Rue Saint-Honore,
who, every time he meets me, never fails to remark:

"Passajon, my friend, don't stop in that den of brigands. You are wrong
to persist in remaining. You will never get a halfpenny out of them. So
come to Hemerlingue's. I undertake to find some little corner for you
there. You will earn less, but you will be paid much more."

I feel that he is quite right, that worthy fellow. But the thing is
stronger than I. I cannot make up my mind to leave. And yet it is by no
means gay, the life I lead here in these great, cold rooms, where no
one ever comes, where each man stows himself away in a corner without
speaking. What will you have? Each knows the other too well. Everything
has been said already.

Again, until last year, we used to have sittings of the board of
inspection, meetings of shareholders, stormy and noisy assemblies,
veritable battles of savages, from which the cries could be heard to
the Madeleine. Several times a week also there would call subscribers
indignant at no longer ever receiving any news of their money. It was
on such occasions that our governor shone. I have seen these people,
monsieur, go into his office furious as wolves thirsting for blood,
and, after a quarter of an hour, come out milder than sheep, satisfied,
reassured, and their pockets relieved of a few bank-notes. For, there
lay the acme of his cleverness; in the extraction of money from the
unlucky people who came to demand it. Nowadays the shareholders of the
Territorial Bank no longer give any sign of existence. I think they are
all dead or else resigned to the situation. The board never meets.
The sittings only take place on paper; it is I who am charged with the
preparation of a so-called report--always the same--which I copy out
afresh each quarter. We should never see a living soul, if, at
long intervals, there did not rise from the depths of Corsica some
subscribers to the statue of Paoli, curious to know how the monument
is progressing; or, it may be, some worthy reader of _Financial Truth_,
which died over two years ago, who calls to renew his subscription with
a timid air, and begs a little more regularity, if possible, in the
forwarding of the paper. There is a faith that nothing shakes. So, when
one of these innocents falls among our hungry band, it is something
terrible. He is surrounded, hemmed in, a