“The citizen looked at me, exclaiming, ’I wish I never had known him; for he has several times borrowed money of me, and shown his friendship by not returning it.  He is a queer fellow,—­good-hearted and all that, but full of illusions! always an imagination on fire!  I will do him this justice,—­he does not mean to deceive; but as he deceives himself about everything, he manages to behave like a dishonest man.’  ‘How much does he owe you?’ I asked.  ’Oh! a good many hundred francs.  He’s a basket with a hole in the bottom.  Nobody knows where his money goes; perhaps he doesn’t know himself.’  ’Has he any resources?’ ‘Well, yes,’ said Barillaud, laughing; ’just now he is talking of buying land among the savages in the United States.’  I carried away with me the drop of vinegar which casual gossip thus put into my heart, and it soured all my feelings.  I went to see my old master, in whose office Mongenod and I had studied law; he was now my counsel.  When I told him about my loan to Mongenod and the manner in which I had acted,—­’What!’ he cried, ’one of my old clerks to behave in that way!  You ought to have put him off till the next day and come to see me.  You would then have found out that I have forbidden my clerks to let Mongenod into this office.  Within the last year he has borrowed three hundred francs of me in silver,—­an enormous sum at present rates.  Three days before he breakfasted with you I met him on the street, and he gave such a piteous account of his poverty that I let him have two louis.’  ’If I have been the dupe of a clever comedian,’ I said to Bordin, ’so much the worse for him, not for me.  But tell me what to do.’  ’You must try to get from him a written acknowledgment; for a debtor, however, insolvent he may be, may become solvent, and then he will pay.’  Thereupon Bordin took from a tin box a case on which I saw the name of Mongenod; he showed me three receipts of a hundred francs each.  ’The next time he comes I shall have him admitted, and I shall make him add the interest and the two louis, and give me a note for the whole.  I shall, at any rate, have things properly done, and be in a position to obtain payment.’  ‘Well,’ said I to Bordin, ’can you have my matter set right so far, as well as yours? for I know you are a good man, and what you do will be right.’  ’I have remained master of my ground,’ he said; ’but when persons behave as you have done they are at the mercy of a man who can snap his fingers at them.  As for me, I don’t choose that any man should get the better of me,—­get the better of a former attorney to the Chatelet! —­ta-ra-ra!  Every man to whom a sum of money is lent as heedlessly as you lent yours to Mongenod, ends, after a certain time, by thinking that money his own.  It is no longer your money, it is his money; you become his creditor,—­an inconvenient, unpleasant person.  A debtor will then try to get rid of you by some juggling with his conscience, and out of one hundred men in his position, seventy-five will do their best never to see or hear of you again.’  ’Then you think only twenty-five men in a hundred are honest?’ ‘Did I say that?’ he replied, smiling maliciously.  ‘The estimate is too high?’”