no sense in poisoning the atmosphere of an office in
that way, and that it was not worth while to maintain premises at a
rent of twelve thousand francs, with eight windows fronting full on the
Boulevard Malesherbes, in order to roast onions in them. I don't know
what he did not say to me in his passion. For my own part, naturally
I got angry at hearing myself addressed in that insolent manner. It is
surely the least a man can do to be polite with people in his service
whom he does not pay. What the deuce! So I answered him that it was
annoying, in truth, but that if the Territorial Bank paid me what it
owed me, namely, four years' arrears of salary, _plus_ seven thousand
francs personal advances made by me to the governor for expenses of
cabs, newspapers, cigars, and American grogs on board days, I would go
and eat decently at the nearest cookshop, and should not be reduced to
cooking, in the room where our board was accustomed to sit, a wretched
stew, for which I had to thank the public compassion of female cooks.
Take that!

In speaking thus I had yielded to an impulse of indignation very
excusable in the eyes of any person whatever acquainted with my position
here. Even so, I had said nothing improper and had confined myself
within the limits of language conformable to my age and education. (I
must have mentioned somewhere in the course of these memoirs that of the
sixty-five years I have lived I passed more than thirty as beadle to the
Faculty of Letters in Dijon. Hence my taste for reports and memoirs, and
those ideas of academical style of which traces will be found in many
passages of this lucubration.) I had, then, expressed myself in the
governor's presence with the most complete reserve, without employing
any one of those terms of abuse to which he is treated by everybody
here, from our two censors--M. de Monpavon, who, every time he comes,
calls him laughingly "Fleur-de-Mazas," and M. de Bois l'Hery, of the
Trumpet Club, coarse as a groom, who, for adieu, always greets him with,
"To your bedstead, bug!"--to our cashier, whom I have heard repeat a
hundred times, tapping on his big book, "That he has in there enough
to send him to the galleys when he pleases." Ah, well! All the same,
my simple observation produced an extraordinary effect upon him. The
circles round his eyes became quite yellow, and, trembling with
rage, one of those evil rages of his country, he uttered these words:
"Passajon, you are a blackgu