honest.'"

"What a joke!"

"Well, you'll see how it answered. I offered my savings as a guarantee
to the master locksmith that he might give me work. 'I'm not a banker to
take money on interest,' says he to me, 'and I don't want any freed
convicts in my shop. I go to work in houses to open doors where keys are
lost, I have a confidential business, and if it were known that I
employed a freed convict amongst my workmen I should lose my customers.
Good day, my man.'"

"Wasn't that just what he deserved, Cardillac?"

"Exactly."

"You simpleton!" said the Gros-Boiteux to Frank, with a paternal air;
"instead of breaking your ban at once, and coming to Paris to melt your
mopusses, so that you might not have a sou left, but be compelled to
return to robbing. You see the end of your fine ideas."

"That's what you are always saying," said Frank, with impatience; "it is
true I was wrong not to spend my 'tin,' for I have not even enjoyed it.
Well, as there were only four locksmiths in Etampes, he whom I had first
addressed had soon told all the others, and they said to me as had said
their fellow tradesman, 'No, thank ye.' All sung the same song."

"Only see, now, what it all comes to! You must see that we are all
marked for life."

"Well, then, I was on the idle of Etampes, and my money melted and
melted," continued Frank, "but no work came. I left Etampes, in spite of
my surveillance, and came to Paris, where I found work immediately, for
my employer did not know who or what I was, and it's no boast to say I
am a first-rate workman. Well, I put my seven hundred francs which I had
remaining into an agent's hands, who gave me a note for it; when that
was due he did not pay me, so I took my note to a _huissier_, who
brought an action against him, and recovered the money, which I left in
his hands, saying to myself there's something for a rainy day. Well,
just then I met the Gros-Boiteux."

"True. Well, Frank was a locksmith and made keys, I had a job in which
he could be of service, and I proposed it to him. I had the prints, and
he had only to go to work, when, only imagine, he refused,--he meant to
turn honest. So, says I, I'll arrange about that, I'll make him work,
for his own interest. So I wrote a letter, without any signature, to his
master, and another to his fellow workmen, to inform them that Frank was
a liberated convict,--so the master turned him away. He went to another
employer and worked there for a week,-