m, he would never have consented to carry on this
correspondence under his own name. He did it for a neighboring doctor,
a simple man, who was not so cautious, and who signed his name to these
letters, glad to get clients from any quarter. For his trouble, Saniel
took this doctor's place during Sunday in summer, and from time to time
received a box of perfumery or quack medicines, which he sold at a low
price when occasion offered.
Every week he received the list of cosmetics and specialties that he
must make use of in his correspondence, no matter how he recommended
them, whether in answer to letters that were really addressed to him, or
by inventing questions that gave him the opportunity to introduce them.
He began to consult this list and the pile of letters from subscribers
that the magazine had sent him, when the doorbell rang. Perhaps it was
a patient, the good patient whom he had expected for four years. He left
his desk to open the door.
It was his coal man, who came with his bill.
"I will stop some day when I am near you," Saniel said. "I am in a hurry
this evening."
"And I am in a hurry, too; I must pay a large bill tomorrow, and I count
upon having some money from you."
"I have no money here."
After a long talk he got rid of the man and returned to his desk. He had
answered but a few of the many letters when his bell rang again. This
time he would not open the door; it was a creditor, without doubt. And
he continued his correspondence.
But for four years he had waited for chance to draw him a good ticket
in the lottery of life--a rich patient afflicted with a cyst or a tumor
that he would take to a fashionable surgeon, who would divide with
him the ten or fifteen thousand francs that he would receive for the
operation. In that case he would be saved.
He ran to the door. The patient with the cyst presented himself in the
form of a small bearded man with a red face, wearing over his vest the
wine-merchant's apron of coarse black cloth. In fact, it was the wine
merchant from the corner, who, having heard of the officer's visit, came
to ask for the payment of his bill for furnishing wine for three months.
A scene similar to that which he had had with the coal merchant, but
more violent, took place, and it was only by threatening to put him out
of the door that Saniel got rid of the man, who went away declaring that
he would come the next morning with an officer.
Saniel returned to his wor
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