as considered to have one of the longest
heads in Paris.

Having rung, the distrustful applicant was not a little astonished at
finding the head clerk busily arranging in a convenient order on his
master's dining-room table the papers relating to the cases to be tried
on the morrow. The clerk, not less astonished, bowed to the Colonel and
begged him to take a seat, which the client did.

"On my word, monsieur, I thought you were joking yesterday when you
named such an hour for an interview," said the old man, with the forced
mirth of a ruined man, who does his best to smile.

"The clerks were joking, but they were speaking the truth too," replied
the man, going on with his work. "M. Derville chooses this hour for
studying his cases, taking stock of their possibilities, arranging
how to conduct them, deciding on the line of defence. His prodigious
intellect is freer at this hour--the only time when he can have the
silence and quiet needed for the conception of good ideas. Since he
entered the profession, you are the third person to come to him for
a consultation at this midnight hour. After coming in the chief will
discuss each case, read everything, spend four or five hours perhaps
over the business, then he will ring for me and explain to me his
intentions. In the morning from ten to two he hears what his clients
have to say, then he spends the rest of his day in appointments. In the
evening he goes into society to keep up his connections. So he has only
the night for undermining his cases, ransacking the arsenal of the code,
and laying his plan of battle. He is determined never to lose a case;
he loves his art. He will not undertake every case, as his brethren do.
That is his life, an exceptionally active one. And he makes a great deal
of money."

As he listened to this explanation, the old man sat silent, and his
strange face assumed an expression so bereft of intelligence, that the
clerk, after looking at him, thought no more about him.

A few minutes later Derville came in, in evening dress; his head clerk
opened the door to him, and went back to finish arranging the papers.
The young lawyer paused for a moment in amazement on seeing in the
dim light the strange client who awaited him. Colonel Chabert was as
absolutely immovable as one of the wax figures in Curtius' collection to
which Godeschal had proposed to treat his fellow-clerks. This quiescence
would not have been a subject for astonishment if it had no