nally, from a cash-box full of coin, he took four hundred and
twenty francs.

"Look here, though, M. Chaboisseau, the bills are either all of them
good, or all bad alike; why don't you take the rest?"

"This is not discounting; I am paying myself for a sale," said the old
man.

Etienne and Lucien were still laughing at Chaboisseau, without
understanding him, when they reached Dauriat's shop, and Etienne asked
Gabusson to give them the name of a bill-broker. Gabusson thus appealed
to gave them a letter of introduction to a broker in the Boulevard
Poissonniere, telling them at the same time that this was the "oddest
and queerest party" (to use his own expression) that he, Gabusson,
had come across. The friends took a cab by the hour, and went to the
address.

"If Samanon won't take your bills," Gabusson had said, "nobody else will
look at them."

A second-hand bookseller on the ground floor, a second-hand
clothes-dealer on the first story, and a seller of indecent prints on
the second, Samanon carried on a fourth business--he was a
money-lender into the bargain. No character in Hoffmann's romances, no
sinister-brooding miser of Scott's, can compare with this freak of human
and Parisian nature (always admitting that Samanon was human). In spite
of himself, Lucien shuddered at the sight of the dried-up little old
creature, whose bones seemed to be cutting a leather skin, spotted with
all sorts of little green and yellow patches, like a portrait by Titian
or Veronese when you look at it closely. One of Samanon's eyes was fixed
and glassy, the other lively and bright; he seemed to keep that dead eye
for the bill-discounting part of his profession, and the other for the
trade in the pornographic curiosities upstairs. A few stray white hairs
escaping from under a small, sleek, rusty black wig, stood erect above a
sallow forehead with a suggestion of menace about it; a hollow trench in
either cheek defined the outline of the jaws; while a set of projecting
teeth, still white, seemed to stretch the skin of the lips with the
effect of an equine yawn. The contrast between the ill-assorted eyes
and grinning mouth gave Samanon a passably ferocious air; and the very
bristles on the man's chin looked stiff and sharp as pins.

Nor was there the slightest sign about him of any desire to redeem a
sinister appearance by attention to the toilet; his threadbare jacket
was all but dropping to pieces; a cravat, which had once been black