The veteran officer was absent; but the old pensioner, sitting on a pile of stamped papers, was munching a crust and acting as sentinel resignedly.  Coloquinte was as much accustomed to his work in the office as to the fatigue duty of former days, understanding as much or as little about it as the why and wherefore of forced marches made by the Emperor’s orders.  Lucien was inspired with the bold idea of deceiving that formidable functionary.  He settled his hat on his head, and walked into the editor’s office as if he were quite at home.

Looking eagerly about him, he beheld a round table covered with a green cloth, and half-a-dozen cherry-wood chairs, newly reseated with straw.  The colored brick floor had not been waxed, but it was clean; so clean that the public, evidently, seldom entered the room.  There was a mirror above the chimney-piece, and on the ledge below, amid a sprinkling of visiting-cards, stood a shopkeeper’s clock, smothered with dust, and a couple of candlesticks with tallow dips thrust into their sockets.  A few antique newspapers lay on the table beside an inkstand containing some black lacquer-like substance, and a collection of quill pens twisted into stars.  Sundry dirty scraps of paper, covered with almost undecipherable hieroglyphs, proved to be manuscript articles torn across the top by the compositor to check off the sheets as they were set up.  He admired a few rather clever caricatures, sketched on bits of brown paper by somebody who evidently had tried to kill time by killing something else to keep his hand in.

Other works of art were pinned in the cheap sea-green wall-paper.  These consisted of nine pen-and-ink illustrations for Le Solitaire.  The work had attained to such an unheard-of European popularity, that journalists evidently were tired of it.—­“The Solitary makes his first appearance in the provinces; sensation among the women.—­The Solitary perused at a chateau.—­Effect of the Solitary on domestic animals.  —­The Solitary explained to savage tribes, with the most brilliant results.—­The Solitary translated into Chinese and presented by the author to the Emperor at Pekin.—­The Mont Sauvage, Rape of Elodie.”  —­(Lucien though this caricature very shocking, but he could not help laughing at it.)—­“The Solitary under a canopy conducted in triumphal procession by the newspapers.—­The Solitary breaks the press to splinters, and wounds the printers.—­Read backwards, the superior beauties of the Solitary produce a sensation at the Academie.”—­On a newspaper-wrapper Lucien noticed a sketch of a contributor holding out his hat, and beneath it the words, “Finot! my hundred francs,” and a name, since grown more notorious than famous.

Between the window and the chimney-piece stood a writing-table, a mahogany armchair, and a waste-paper basket on a strip of hearth-rug; the dust lay thick on all these objects.  There were short curtains in the windows.  About a score of new books lay on the writing-table, deposited there apparently during the day, together with prints, music, snuff-boxes of the “Charter” pattern, a copy of the ninth edition of Le Solitaire (the great joke of the moment), and some ten unopened letters.