Cadenet, it was said, had proof of the widow Poiret having deposited in Cerizet’s hands some two thousand francs for investment, which may explain the progress of the latter’s affairs since the day when he first took up his abode in the quarter, supplied with a last note of a thousand francs and Dutocq’s protection.  Cadenet, prompted by a cupidity which success increased, had proposed, early in the year, to put twenty thousand francs into the hands of his friend Cerizet.  But Cerizet had positively declined them, on the ground that he ran risks of a nature to become a possible cause of dispute with associates.

“I could only,” he said to Cadenet, “take them at six per cent interest, and you can do better than that in your own business.  We will go into partnership later, if you like, in some serious enterprise, some good opportunity which may require, say, fifty thousand francs.  When you have got that sum to invest, let me know, and we’ll talk about it.”

Cerizet had only suggested the affair of the house to Theodose after making sure that among the three, Madame Poiret, Cadenet, and himself, it was impossible to raise the full sum of one hundred thousand francs.

The “lender by the little week” was thus in perfect safety in his den, where he could even, if necessity came, appeal to the law.  On certain mornings there might be seen as many as sixty or eighty persons, men as often as women, either in the wine-shop, or the alley, or sitting on the staircase, for the distrustful Cerizet would only admit six persons at a time into his office.  The first comers were first served, and each had to go by his number, which the wine-merchant, or his shop-boy, affixed to the hats of the man and the backs of the women.  Sometimes the clients would sell to each other (as hackney-coachmen do on the cabstands), head numbers for tail numbers.  On certain days, when the market business was pressing, a head number was often sold for a glass of brandy and a sou.  The numbers, as they issued from Cerizet’s office, called up the succeeding numbers; and if any disputes arose Cadenet put a stop to the fray at once my remarking:—­

“If you get the police here you won’t gain anything; he’ll shut up shop.”

HE was Cerizet’s name.  When, in the course of the day, some hapless woman, without an atom of food in her room, and seeing her children pale with hunger, would come to borrow ten or twenty sous, she would say to the wine-merchant anxiously:—­

“Is he there?”

Cadenet, a short, stout man, dressed in blue, with outer sleeves of black stuff and a wine-merchant’s apron, and always wearing a cap, seemed an angel to these mothers when he replied to them:—­

“He told me that you were an honest woman and I might give you forty sous.  You know what you must do about it—­”

And, strange to say, he was blessed by these poor people, even as they had lately blessed Popinot.