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 of intelligences, the brain that gives off the
largest quantity of nitrogen asphyxiates the others, in the long run.

The cashier was a man of five and forty or thereabouts. As he sat at
the table, the light from a moderator lamp shining full on his bald
head and glistening fringe of iron-gray hair that surrounded it--this
baldness and the round outlines of his face made his head look very
like a ball. His complexion was brick-red, a few wrinkles had gathered
about his eyes, but he had the smooth, plump hands of a stout man. His
b