hirst for payment, in three months. Before ninety
days are over, the creditors, worn out by coming and going, by the
marches and countermarches which a failure entails, are asleep at
the side of their excellent little wives. This may help a stranger to
understand why it is that the provisional in France is so often the
definitive: out of every thousand provisional assignees, not more than
five ever become permanent. The subsidence of passions stirred up by
failures is thus accounted for.

But here it becomes necessary to explain to persons who have not had the
happiness to be in business the whole drama of bankruptcy, so as to make
them understand how it constitutes in Paris a monstrous legal farce; and
also how the bankruptcy of Cesar Birotteau was a signal exception to the
general rule.

This fine commercial drama is in three distinct acts,--the agent's act,
the assignee's act, the _concordat_, or certificate-of-bankruptcy act.
Like all theatrical performances, it is played with a double-intent:
it is put upon the stage for the public eye, but it also has a hidden
purpose; there is one performance for the pit, and another for the
side-scenes. Posted in the side-scenes are the bankrupt and his
solicitor, the attorney of the creditors, the assignees, the agent, and
the judge-commissioner himself. No one out of Paris knows, and no one in
Paris does not know, that a judge of the commercial courts is the most
extraordinary magistrate that society ever allowed itself to create.
This judge may live in dread of his own justice at any moment. Paris
has seen the president of her courts of commerce file his own schedule.
Instead of being an experienced retired merchant, to whom the magistracy
might properly be made the reward of a pure life, this judge is a
trader, bending under the weight of enormous enterprises, and at the
head of some large commercial house. The _sine qua non_ condition in the
election of this functionary, whose business it is to pass judgment
on the avalanche of commercial suits incessantly rolling through the
courts, is that he shall have the greatest difficulty in managing his
own affairs. This commercial tribunal, far from being made a useful
means of transition whereby a merchant might rise, without ridicule,
into the ranks of the nobility, is in point of fact made up of traders
who are trading, and who are liable to suffer for their judgments when
they next meet with dissatisfied parties,--very much as