nd that he ran risks of a nature to
become a possible cause of dispute with associates.

"I could only," he said to Cadenet, "take them at six per cent interest,
and you can do better than that in your own business. We will go into
partnership later, if you like, in some serious enterprise, some good
opportunity which may require, say, fifty thousand francs. When you have
got that sum to invest, let me know, and we'll talk about it."

Cerizet had only suggested the affair of the house to Theodose after
making sure that among the three, Madame Poiret, Cadenet, and himself,
it was impossible to raise the full sum of one hundred thousand francs.

The "lender by the little week" was thus in perfect safety in his den,
where he could even, if necessity came, appeal to the law. On certain
mornings there might be seen as many as sixty or eighty persons, men as
often as women, either in the wine-shop, or the alley, or sitting on the
staircase, for the distrustful Cerizet would only admit six persons at
a time into his office. The first comers were first served, and each had
to go by his number, which the wine-merchant, or his shop-boy, affixed
to the hats of the man and the backs of the women. Sometimes the clients
would sell to each other (as hackney-coachmen do on the cabstands), head
numbers for tail numbers. On certain days, when the market business was
pressing, a head number was often sold for a glass of brandy and a
sou. The numbers, as they issued from Cerizet's office, called up the
succeeding numbers; and if any disputes arose Cadenet put a stop to the
fray at once my remarking:--

"If you get the police here you won't gain anything; _he_'ll shut up
shop."

HE was Cerizet's name. When, in the course of the day, some hapless
woman, without an atom of food in her room, and seeing her children pale
with hunger, would come to borrow ten or twenty sous, she would say to
the wine-merchant anxiously:--

"Is _he_ there?"

Cadenet, a short, stout man, dressed in blue, with outer sleeves of
black stuff and a wine-merchant's apron, and always wearing a cap,
seemed an angel to these mothers when he replied to them:--

"_He_ told me that you were an honest woman and I might give you forty
sous. You know what you must do about it--"

And, strange to say, _he_ was blessed by these poor people, even as they
had lately blessed Popinot.

But Cerizet was cursed on Sunday mornings when accounts were settled;
and they cursed hi