I received no answer.  I waited three years, placing all my hopes on that answer.  At last I resigned myself to my life.  To the five hundred francs I received from the Funds I now added twelve hundred from the Mont-de-piete (for they raised my salary), and five hundred which I obtained from Monsieur Cesar Birotteau, perfumer, for keeping his books in the evening.  Thus, not only did I manage to get along comfortably, but I laid by eight hundred francs a year.  At the beginning of 1814 I invested nine thousand francs of my savings at forty francs in the Funds, and thus I was sure of sixteen hundred francs a year for my old age.  By that time I had fifteen hundred a year from the Mont-de-piete, six hundred for my book-keeping, sixteen hundred from the Funds; in all, three thousand seven hundred francs a year.  I took a lodging in the rue de Seine, and lived a little better.  My place had brought me into relations with many unfortunates.  For the last twelve years I had known better than any man whatsoever the misery of the poor.  Once or twice I had been able to do a real service.  I felt a vivid pleasure when I found that out of ten persons relieved, one or two households had been put on their feet.  It came into my mind that benevolence ought not to consist in throwing money to those who suffered.  ’Doing charity,’ to use that common expression, seemed to me too often a premium offered to crime.  I began to study the question.  I was then fifty years of age, and my life was nearly over.  ‘Of what good am I?’ thought I.  ’To whom can I leave my savings?  When I have furnished my rooms handsomely, and found a good cook, and made my life suitable in all respects, what then?—­how shall I employ my time?’ Eleven years of revolution, and fifteen years of poverty, had, as I may say, eaten up the most precious parts of my life,—­used it up in sterile toil for my own individual preservation.  No man at the age of fifty could spring from that obscure, repressed condition to a brilliant future; but every man could be of use.  I understood by this time that watchful care and wise counsels have tenfold greater value than money given; for the poor, above all things, need a guide, if only in the labor they do for others, for speculators are never lacking to take advantage of them.  Here I saw before me both an end and an occupation, not to speak of the exquisite enjoyments obtained by playing in a miniature way the role of Providence.”

“And to-day you play it in a grand way, do you not?” asked Godefroid, eagerly.

“Ah! you want to know everything,” said the old man.  “No, no!  Would you believe it,” he continued after this interruption, “the smallness of my means to do the work I now desired to do brought back the thought of Mongenod.  ‘If it were not for Mongenod,’ I kept saying to myself, ’I could do so much more.  If a dishonest man had not deprived me of fifteen hundred francs a year I could save this or that poor family.’  Excusing my own impotence by accusing another, I felt