day lounging from chair to chair, from
window to window, to look out (eight front windows on the boulevard).
So we try to get such work as we can. For my part, I write for
Mademoiselle Seraphine and another cook in the house. Then I write
up my memoirs, which takes no small amount of time. Our receiving
teller--there's a fellow who hasn't a very laborious task with
us--makes netting for a house that deals in fishermen's supplies. One
of our two copyists, who writes a beautiful hand, copies plays for a
dramatic agency; the other makes little toys worth a sou, which are
sold by hucksters at the street corners toward New Year's Day, and in
that way succeeds in keeping himself from starving to death the rest of
the year. Our cashier is the only one who does no outside work. He
would think that he had forfeited his honor. He is a very proud man,
who never complains, and whose only fear is that he may seem to be
short of linen. Locked into his office, he employs his time from
morning till night, making shirt-fronts, collars and cuffs out of
paper. He has attained very great skill, and his linen, always
dazzlingly white, would deceive any one, were it not that, at the
slightest movement, when he walks, when he sits down, it cracks as if
he had a pasteboard box in his stomach. Unluckily all that paper does
not feed him; and he is so thin, he has such a gaunt look, that one
wonders what he can live on. Between ourselves, I suspect him of
sometimes paying a visit to my pantry. That's an easy matter for him;
for, in his capacity of cashier, he has the "word" that opens the
secret lock, and I fancy that, when my back is turned, he does a little
foraging among my supplies.

Surely this is a most extraordinary, incredible banking-house. And yet
what I am writing is the solemn truth, and Paris is full of financial
establishments of the same sort as ours. Ah! if I ever publish my
memoirs. But let me take up the interrupted thread of my narrative.

When we were all assembled in his office, the manager said to us with
great solemnity:

"Messieurs and dear comrades, the time of our trials is at an end. The
_Caisse Territoriale_ is entering upon a new phase of its existence."

With that he began to tell us about a superb _combinazione_--that is
his favorite word, and he says it in such an insinuating tone!--a
_combinazione_ in which the famous Nabob of whom all the papers are
talking is to have a part. Thus the _Caisse Territoriale_ w