The whole of the year 1838 was employed in making this change in his condition, and he led a most regular life.  He studied at home in the mornings till dinner-time, going sometimes to the Palais for important cases.  Having become very intimate with Dutocq (so Dutocq said), he did certain services to the poor of the faubourg Saint-Jacques who were brought to his notice by that official.  He pleaded their cases before the court, after bringing them to the notice of the attorneys, who, according to the statutes of their order, are obliged to take turns in doing business for the poor.  As Theodose was careful to plead only safe cases, he won them all.  Those persons whom he thus obliged expressed their gratitude and their admiration, in spite of the young lawyer’s admonitions, among their own class, and to the porters of private houses, through whom many anecdotes rose to the ears of the proprietors.  Delighted to have in their house a tenant so worthy and so charitable, the Thuilliers wished to attract him to their salon, and they questioned Dutocq about him.  The mayor’s clerk replied as the envious reply; while doing justice to the young man he dwelt on his remarkable avarice, which might, however, be the effect of poverty.

“I have had other information about him.  He belongs to the Peyrades, an old family of the ‘comtat’ of Avignon; he came here toward the end of 1829, to inquire about an uncle whose fortune was said to be considerable; he discovered the address of the old man only three days before his death; and the furniture of the deceased merely sufficed to bury him and pay his debts.  A friend of this useless uncle gave a couple of hundred louis to the poor fortune-hunter, advising him to finish his legal studies and enter the judiciary career.  Those two hundred louis supported him for three years in Paris, where he lived like an anchorite.  But being unable to discover his unknown friend and benefactor, the poor student was in abject distress in 1833.  He worked then, like so many other licentiates, in politics and literature, by which he kept himself for a time above want—­for he had nothing to expect from his family.  His father, the youngest brother of the dead uncle, has eleven other children, who live on a small estate called Les Canquoelles.  He finally obtained a place on a ministerial newspaper, the manager of which was the famous Cerizet, so celebrated for the persecutions he met with, under the Restoration, on account of his attachment to the liberals,—­a man whom the new Left will never forgive for having made his paper ministerial.  As the government of these days does very little to protect even its most devoted servants (witness the Gisquet affair), the republicans have ended by ruining Cerizet.  I tell you this to explain how it is that Cerizet is now a copying clerk in my office.  Well, in the days when he flourished as managing editor of a paper directed by the Perier ministry against the incendiary journals,