ave the place the look of a
bath-house. At four o'clock the stolid porter had proclaimed, according
to his orders, "The bank is closed." And by this time the departments
were deserted, wives of the partners in the firm were expecting their
lovers; the two bankers dining with their mistresses. Everything was in
order.

The place where the strong boxes had been bedded in sheet-iron was just
behind the little sanctum, where the cashier was busy. Doubtless he was
balancing his books. The open front gave a glimpse of a safe of hammered
iron, so enormously heavy (thanks to the science of the modern inventor)
that burglars could not carry it away. The door only opened at the
pleasure of those who knew its password. The letter-lock was a warden
who kept its own secret and could not be bribed; the mysterious word was
an ingenious realization of the "Open sesame!" in the _Arabian Nights_.
But even this was as nothing. A man might discover the password; but
unless he knew the lock's final secret, the _ultima ratio_ of this
gold-guarding dragon of mechanical science, it discharged a blunderbuss
at his head.

The door of the room, the walls of the room, the shutters of the windows
in the room, the whole place, in fact, was lined with sheet-iron a third
of an inch in thickness, concealed behind the thin wooden paneling. The
shutters had been closed, the door had been shut. If ever man could feel
confident that he was absolutely alone, and that there was no remote
possibility of being watched by prying eyes, that man was the cashier of
the house of Nucingen and Company, in the Rue Saint-Lazare.

Accordingly the deepest silence prevailed in that iron cave. The fire
had died out in the stove, but the room was full of that tepid warmth
which produces the dull heavy-headedness and nauseous queasiness of a
morning after an orgy. The stove is a mesmerist that plays no small part
in the reduction of bank clerks and porters to a state of idiocy.

A room with a stove in it is a retort in which the power of strong
men is evaporated, where their vitality is exhausted, and their wills
enfeebled. Government offices are part of a great scheme for the
manufacture of the mediocrity necessary for the maintenance of a Feudal
System on a pecuniary basis--and money is the foundation of the Social
Contract. (See _Les Employes_.) The mephitic vapors in the atmosphere
of a crowded room contribute in no small degree to bring about a gradual
deterioration