the ten thousand the duke has promised him if he
gets rid of his picture, will make a very pretty little profit for him.

While these fortunate ones succeed one another, others prowl about
frantic with impatience, biting their nails to the quick; for one and
all have come with the same object. From honest Jenkins, who headed the
procession, down to Cabassu, the _masseur_, who closes it, one and
all lead the Nabob aside. But however far away they take him in that
long file of salons, there is always some indiscreet mirror to reflect
the figure of the master of the house, and the pantomime of his broad
back. That back is so eloquent! At times it straightens up indignantly.
"Oh! no, that is too much!" Or else it collapses with comical
resignation. "Very well, if you will have it so." And Bompain's fez
always lurking in some corner of the landscape.

When these have finished, others arrive; they are the small fish that
follow in the wake of the great sharks in the savage hunting in the
sea. There is constant going and coming through those superb white and
gold salons, a slamming of doors, an unbroken current of insolent
extortion of the most hackneyed type, attracted from the four corners
of Paris and the suburbs by that enormous fortune and that incredible
gullibility.

For these small sums, this incessant doling out of cash, he did not
have recourse to the checkbook. In one of his salons the Nabob kept a
commode, an ugly little piece of furniture representing the savings of
some concierge; it was the first article Jansoulet bought when he was
in a position to renounce furnished apartments, and he had kept it ever
since like a gambler's fetish; its three drawers always contained two
hundred thousand francs in current funds. He resorted to that
never-failing supply on the days of his great audiences, ostentatiously
plunging his hands in the gold and silver, stuffing it into his pockets
to produce it later with the gesture of a cattle-dealer, a certain
vulgar way of raising the skirts of his coat and sending his hand "down
to the bottom of the pile." A tremendous inroad must have been made
upon the little drawers to-day.

* * *

After so many whispered conferences, requests more or less clearly
stated, anxious entrances and triumphant exits, the last client
dismissed, the commode drawers locked, the apartment on Place Vendome
was left in solitude in the fading light of four o'clock