men like myself, persist in putting in an appearance regularly every morning at the same hour, from habit, from want of occupation, not knowing what else to do.  Every one, however, busies himself about things quite foreign to the work of the office.  A man must live, you know.  And then, too, one cannot pass the day dragging one’s self from easy chair to easy chair, from window to window, to look out of doors (eight windows fronting on the Boulevard).  So one tries to do some work as best one can.  I myself, as I have said, keep the accounts of Mme. Seraphine, and of another cook in the building.  Also, I write my memoirs, which, again, takes a good deal of my time.  Our receipt clerk—­one who has not very hard work with us—­makes line for a firm that deals in fishing requisites.  Of our two copying-clerks, one, who writes a good hand, copies plays for a dramatic agency; the other invents little halfpenny toys which the hawkers sell at street corners about the time of the New Year, and manages by this means to keep himself from dying of hunger during all the rest of the year.  Our cashier is the only one who does no outside work.  He would believe his honour lost if he did.  He is a very proud man, who never utters a complaint, and whose one dread is to have the appearance of being in want of linen.  Locked in his office, he is occupied from morning till evening in the manufacture of shirt-fronts, collars, and cuffs of paper.  In this, he has attained very great skill, and his ever-dazzling linen would deceive, if it were not that at the least movement, when he walks, when he sits down, the stuff crackles upon him as though he had a cardboard box under his waistcoat.  Unfortunately all this paper does not feed him; and he is so thin, has such a mien, that you ask yourself on what he lives.  Between ourselves, I suspect him of paying a visit sometimes to my store-cupboard.  He can do so with ease; for, as cashier, he has the “word” which opens the safe with the secret lock, and I fancy that when my back is turned he forages a little among my provisions.

These are certainly very extraordinary, very incredible internal arrangements for a banking house.  It is, however, the mere truth that I am telling, and Paris is full of financial institutions after the pattern of ours.  Oh, if ever I publish my memoirs!  But to take up the interrupted thread of my story.

When he saw us all collected in his private room, the manager said to us with solemnity: 

“Gentlemen and dear comrades, the time of trials is ended.  The Territorial Bank inaugurates a new phase.”