The Project Gutenberg EBook of Colonel Chabert, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: Colonel Chabert

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell

Release Date: November, 1999 [Etext #1954]
Posting Date: March 6, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COLONEL CHABERT ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

COLONEL CHABERT

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell

DEDICATION

To Madame la Comtesse Ida de Bocarme nee du Chasteler.

COLONEL CHABERT

"HULLO! There is that old Box-coat again!"

This exclamation was made by a lawyer's clerk of the class called in
French offices a gutter-jumper--a messenger in fact--who at this moment
was eating a piece of dry bread with a hearty appetite. He pulled off
a morsel of crumb to make into a bullet, and fired it gleefully through
the open pane of the window against which he was leaning. The pellet,
well aimed, rebounded almost as high as the window, after hitting the
hat of a stranger who was crossing the courtyard of a house in the Rue
Vivienne, where dwelt Maitre Derville, attorney-at-law.

"Come, Simonnin, don't play tricks on people, or I will turn you out of
doors. However poor a client may be, he is still a man, hang it all!"
said the head clerk, pausing in the addition of a bill of costs.

The lawyer's messenger is commonly, as was Simonnin, a lad of thirteen
or fourteen, who, in every office, is under the special jurisdiction of
the managing clerk, whose errands and _billets-doux_ keep him employed
on his way to carry writs to the bailiffs and petitions to the Courts.
He is akin to the street boy in his habits, and to the pettifogger
by fate. The boy is almost always ruthless, unbroken, unmanageable, a
ribald rhymester, impudent, greedy, and idle. And yet, almost all these
clerklings have an old mother lodging on some fifth floor with whom they
share their pittance of thirty or forty francs a month.

"If he is a man, why do you call him old Box-coat?" asked Simonnin, with
the air of a schoolboy who has caught out his master.

And