"However, this forced retirement has compelled me to be economical; I have given you a superb payment on account."
"Twenty-five francs! Do you call that superb?"
"Everything is comparative; I usually give you only a hundred sous. My eye is getting well, thank God! I shall soon resume my activity."
"And run after your girls again, I suppose?"
"No, on my word as a gentleman, I shan't begin that again; I've had enough of it! I have my cue. I am going to try to find my friend Gustave; he may have been in Paris since I have kept my room. My first visit will be to his uncle, a by no means amiable party, who presumes to look askance at me; but, so long as he tells me where his nephew is, I will allow him to make faces at me, if it affords him any pleasure."
A few days later, Cherami was, in fact, able to go out, and without a bandage; his eye had resumed its normal appearance. Our man had taken great pains with his toilet: his boots were polished, his hat and coat carefully brushed; he took his switch, entered the omnibus from Belleville, took an exchange check, and, in due time, arrived at the banker's establishment in Faubourg Montmartre.
On this occasion, Cherami did not stop to talk with the concierge; he went straight to the office and found the same clerk still at work on his figures. It is a fact that there are some clerks in banking-houses who pass almost the whole day at that work. When they go to sleep, it would seem that they must always see figures dancing and fluttering about them; what a pleasant life! and what delightful dreams!
Cherami stopped in front of the old clerk, who kept his eyes fixed on his ledger as before, making the same dull sound that some machines make: "Six—eight—fourteen—twenty-seven—thirty."
"I say, my good man, haven't you stopped that since the last time I came?" cried Cherami, tapping on the clerk's desk with his switch. "Sapristi! you're no common clerk; you're a living logarithm, a ciphering-machine on which somebody ought to take out a patent! You ought to fetch a big price."
The old clerk replied simply, without raising his head: