he had caught a glimpse of
green curtains yellowed by the sun. He read the word "Offices," stamped
in black letters on an oval copper-plate; he rapped, nobody answered,
and he went in. The place, worse than humble, conveyed an idea of
penury, or avarice, or neglect. No employe was to be seen behind
the brass lattice which topped an unpainted white wooden enclosure,
breast-high, within which were tables and desks in stained black wood.
These deserted places were littered with inkstands, in which the ink was
mouldy and the pens as rumpled as a ragammufin's head, and twisted like
sunfish; with boxes and papers and printed matter,--all worthless,
no doubt. The floor was as dirty, defaced, and damp as that of a
boarding-house. The second room, announced by the word "Counting-Room"
on its door, harmonized with the grim _facetiae_ of its neighbor. In one
corner was a large space screened off by an oak balustrade, trellised
with copper wire and furnished with a sliding cat-hole, within which was
an enormous iron chest. This space, apparently given over to the rioting
of rats, also contained an odd-looking desk, with a shabby arm-chair,
which was ragged, green, and torn in the seat,--from which the
horse-hair protruded, like the wig of its master, in half a hundred
libertine curls. The chief adornment of this room, which had evidently
been the salon of the appartement before it was converted into a
banking-office, was a round table covered with a green cloth, round
which stood a few old chairs of black leather with tarnished gilt nails.
The fireplace, somewhat elegant, showed none of the sooty marks of a
fire; the hearth was clean; the mirror, covered with fly-specks, had a
paltry air, in keeping with a mahogany clock bought at the sale of some
old notary, which annoyed the eye, already depressed by two candelabras
without candles and the sticky dust that covered them. The wall-paper,
mouse-gray with a pink border, revealed, by certain fuliginous stains,
the unwholesome presence of smokers. Nothing ever more faithfully
represented that prosaic precinct called by the newspapers an "editorial
sanctum." Birotteau, fearing that he might be indiscreet, knocked
sharply three times on the door opposite to that by which he entered.

"Come in!" cried Claparon, the reverberation of whose voice revealed
the distance it had to traverse and the emptiness of the room,--in
which Cesar heard the crackling of a good fire, though the owner was
ap