“Some of my clients,” he told me.  So amazing to me was the trade of this extraordinary shop that I engaged the old man in conversation, repulsive though he was, and from his garrulity I gathered these facts.  He spoke in perfect English though his utterance was somewhat thick and heavy; no language seemed to come amiss to him.  He had been in business a great many years, how many he would not say, and was far older than he looked.  All kinds of people did business in his shop.  What they exchanged with each other he did not care except that it had to be evils, he was not empowered to carry on any other kind of business.

There was no evil, he told me, that was not negotiable there; no evil the old man knew had ever been taken away in despair from his shop.  A man might have to wait and come back again next day, and next day and the day after, paying twenty francs each time, but the old man had the addresses of all his clients and shrewdly knew their needs, and soon the right two met and eagerly exchanged their commodities.  “Commodities” was the old man’s terrible word, said with a gruesome smack of his heavy lips, for he took a pride in his business and evils to him were goods.

I learned from him in ten minutes very much of human nature, more than I have ever learned from any other man; I learned from him that a man’s own evil is to him the worst thing there is or ever could be, and that an evil so unbalances all men’s minds that they always seek for extremes in that small grim shop.  A woman that had no children had exchanged with an impoverished half-maddened creature with twelve.  On one occasion a man had exchanged wisdom for folly.

“Why on earth did he do that?” I said.

“None of my business,” the old man answered in his heavy indolent way.  He merely took his twenty francs from each and ratified the agreement in the little room at the back opening out of the shop where his clients do business.  Apparently the man that had parted with wisdom had left the shop upon the tips of his toes with a happy though foolish expression all over his face, but the other went thoughtfully away wearing a troubled and very puzzled look.  Almost always it seemed they did business in opposite evils.

But the thing that puzzled me most in all my talks with that unwieldy man, the thing that puzzles me still, is that none that had once done business in that shop ever returned again; a man might come day after day for many weeks, but once do business and he never returned; so much the old man told me, but when I asked him why, he only muttered that he did not know.