t, commission on all the profits of the firm. I gave him twenty
francs out of the money which I had earned at the sweat of my brow in
the service of Estelle Bachelier. Twenty francs, Sir! Reckoning two
hundred francs as business profit on the affair, a generous provision
you will admit! And yet he taunted me with having received a thousand.
This was mere guesswork, of course, and I took no notice of his
taunts: did the brains that conceived the business deserve no payment?
Was my labour to be counted as dross?--the humiliation, the blows
which I had to endure while he sat in hoggish content, eating and
sleeping without thought for the morrow? After which he calmly
pocketed the twenty francs to earn which he had not raised one finger,
and then demanded more.

No, no, my dear Sir, you will believe me or not, that man could not go
straight. Times out of count he would try and deceive me, despite the
fact that, once or twice, he very nearly came hopelessly to grief in
the attempt.

Now, just to give you an instance. About this time Paris was in the
grip of a gang of dog-thieves as unscrupulous and heartless as they
were daring. Can you wonder at it? with that awful penury about and a
number of expensive "tou-tous" running about the streets under the
very noses of the indigent proletariat? The ladies of the aristocracy
and of the wealthy bourgeoisie had imbibed this craze for lap-dogs
during their sojourn in England at the time of the emigration, and
being women of the Latin race and of undisciplined temperament, they
were just then carrying their craze to excess.

As I was saying, this indulgence led to wholesale thieving. Tou-tous
were abstracted from their adoring mistresses with marvellous
adroitness; whereupon two or three days would elapse while the adoring
mistress wept buckets full of tears and set the police of M. Fouche,
Duc d'Otrante, by the ears in search of her pet. The next act in the
tragi-comedy would be an anonymous demand for money--varying in amount
in accordance with the known or supposed wealth of the lady--and an
equally anonymous threat of dire vengeance upon the tou-tou if the
police were put upon the track of the thieves.

You will ask me, no doubt, what all this had to do with Theodore.
Well! I will tell you.

You must know that of late he had become extraordinarily haughty and
independent. I could not keep him to his work. His duties were to
sweep the office--he did not do it; to light the fi