s hanging from
them at the ends of red tape, which give a peculiar physiognomy to law
papers. The lower rows were filled with cardboard boxes, yellow with
use, on which might be read the names of the more important clients
whose cases were juicily stewing at this present time. The dirty
window-panes admitted but little daylight. Indeed, there are very few
offices in Paris where it is possible to write without lamplight before
ten in the morning in the month of February, for they are all left to
very natural neglect; every one comes and no one stays; no one has any
personal interest in a scene of mere routine--neither the attorney, nor
the counsel, nor the clerks, trouble themselves about the appearance
of a place which, to the youths, is a schoolroom; to the clients, a
passage; to the chief, a laboratory. The greasy furniture is handed down
to successive owners with such scrupulous care, that in some offices
may still be seen boxes of _remainders_, machines for twisting
parchment gut, and bags left by the prosecuting parties of the Chatelet
(abbreviated to _Chlet_)--a Court which, under the old order of things,
represented the present Court of First Instance (or County Court).

So in this dark office, thick with dust, there was, as in all its
fellows, something repulsive to the clients--something which made it
one of the most hideous monstrosities of Paris. Nay, were it not for
the mouldy sacristies where prayers are weighed out and paid for like
groceries, and for the old-clothes shops, where flutter the rags that
blight all the illusions of life by showing us the last end of all our
festivities--an attorney's office would be, of all social marts, the
most loathsome. But we might say the same of the gambling-hell, of the
Law Court, of the lottery office, of the brothel.

But why? In these places, perhaps, the drama being played in a man's
soul makes him indifferent to accessories, which would also account for
the single-mindedness of great thinkers and men of great ambitions.

"Where is my penknife?"

"I am eating my breakfast."

"You go and be hanged! here is a blot on the copy."

"Silence, gentlemen!"

These various exclamations were uttered simultaneously at the moment
when the old client shut the door with the sort of humility which
disfigures the movements of a man down on his luck. The stranger tried
to smile, but the muscles of his face relaxed as he vainly looked for
some symptoms of amenity on the inex