, was
frayed by contact with a stubble chin, and left on exhibition a throat
as wrinkled as a turkey-gobbler's.

This was the individual whom Etienne and Lucien discovered in his filthy
counting-house, busily affixing tickets to the backs of a parcel
of books from a recent sale. In a glance, the friends exchanged the
innumerable questions raised by the existence of such a creature; then
they presented Gabusson's introduction and Fendant and Cavalier's bills.
Samanon was still reading the note when a third comer entered, the
wearer of a short jacket, which seemed in the dimly-lighted shop to be
cut out of a piece of zinc roofing, so solid was it by reason of alloy
with all kinds of foreign matter. Oddly attired as he was, the man was
an artist of no small intellectual power, and ten years later he was
destined to assist in the inauguration of the great but ill-founded
Saint-Simonian system.

"I want my coat, my black trousers, and satin waistcoat," said this
person, pressing a numbered ticket on Samanon's attention. Samanon
touched the brass button of a bell-pull, and a woman came down from
some upper region, a Normande apparently, to judge by her rich, fresh
complexion.

"Let the gentleman have his clothes," said Samanon, holding out a hand
to the newcomer. "It's a pleasure to do business with you, sir; but
that youngster whom one of your friends introduced to me took me in most
abominably."

"Took _him_ in!" chuckled the newcomer, pointing out Samanon to the two
journalists with an extremely comical gesture. The great man dropped
thirty sous into the money-lender's yellow, wrinkled hand; like the
Neapolitan _lazzaroni_, he was taking his best clothes out of pawn for a
state occasion. The coins dropped jingling into the till.

"What queer business are you up to?" asked Lousteau of the artist, an
opium-eater who dwelt among visions of enchanted palaces till he either
could not or would not create.

"_He_ lends you a good deal more than an ordinary pawnbroker on anything
you pledge; and, besides, he is so awfully charitable, he allows you to
take your clothes out when you must have something to wear. I am going
to dine with the Kellers and my mistress to-night," he continued; "and
to me it is easier to find thirty sous than two hundred francs, so I
keep my wardrobe here. It has brought the charitable usurer a hundred
francs in the last six months. Samanon has devoured my library already,
volume by volume" (_livre