Honore de Balzac

Colonel Chabert Honore de Balzac

"HULLO! There is that old Box-coat again!"This exclamation was made by a lawyer's clerk of the class called in French offices a gutter-jumper-a messenger in fact-who at this moment was eating a piece of dry breadwith a hearty appetite. He pulled off a morsel of crumb to make into a bullet, and fired itgleefully through the open pane of the window against which he was leaning. The pellet, well aimed, rebounded almost as high as the window, after hitting the hat of a strangerwho was crossing the courtyard of a house in the Rue Vivienne, where dwelt MaitreDerville, attorney-at-law. "Come, Simonnin, don't play tricks on people, or I will turn you out of doors. Howeverpoor a client may be, he is still a man, hang it all!" said the head clerk, pausing in theaddition of a bill of costs. The lawyer's messenger is commonly, as was Simonnin, a lad of thirteen or fourteen, who, in every office, is under the special jurisdiction of the managing clerk, whose errandsand billets-doux keep him employed on his way to carry writs to the bailiffs and petitionsto the Courts. He is akin to the street boy in his habits, and to the pettifogger by fate. Theboy is almost always ruthless, unbroken, unmanageable, a ribald rhymester, impudent, greedy, and idle. And yet, almost all these clerklings have an old mother lodging on somefifth floor with whom they share their pittance of thirty or forty francs a mo