ineyard,
with no other care than that of seeing the clusters grow round and
golden in the good Burgundian sun, and to gather from the leaves, after
the dew, the little gray snails, so excellent when they are fried.
I should have built for myself with my savings, at the end of the
vineyard, on the height--I can see the place at this moment--a tower in
rough stone, like M. Chalmette's, so convenient for an afternoon nap,
while the quails are chirping round the place. But always misled by
deceiving illusions, I wished to enrich myself, speculate, meddle in
finance, chain my fortune to the car of the conquerors of the day; and
now here I am back again in the saddest pages of my history, clerk in
a bankrupt establishment, my duty to answer a horde of creditors, of
shareholders drunk with fury, who load my white hairs with the worst
outrages, and would like to make me responsible for the ruin of the
Nabob and the flight of the governor; as if I myself was not as cruelly
struck by the loss of my four years of arrears, and my seven thousand
francs which I had confided to that scoundrel of Paganetti de
Porto-Vecchio.

But it is my fate to empty the cup of humiliation and degradation to the
dregs. Have I not been made to appear before a Juge d'Instruction--I,
Passajon, former apparitor of the faculty, with thirty years of faithful
service, and the ribbon of Officer of the Academy? Oh! when I saw
myself going up that staircase of the Palace of Justice, so big, so
conspicuous, without a rail to hold by, I felt my head turning and my
legs sinking under me. I was forced to reflect there, crossing these
halls, black with lawyers and judges, studded with great green doors
behind which one heard the imposing noise of the hearings; and up
higher, in the corridor of the Juges d'Instruction, during my hour's
waiting on a bench, where the prison vermin crawled on my legs, while I
listened to a lot of thieves, pickpockets, and loose women talking and
laughing with the gendarmes, and the butts of the rifles echo in the
passages, and the dull roll of prison vans. I understood then the danger
of "combinations," and that it was not always good to ridicule M. Gogo.

What reassured me, however, was that never having taken any part in the
deliberations of the Territorial, I had no share in their dealings and
intrigues. But explain this to me: Once in the judge's office, before
that man in a velvet cap looking at me across his table with his little