Then all three began to laugh at the same moment, and heartily too, as if at a joke, a rather broad joke, on the part of the old cashier.  “Go along with you, you sly old Pere Planus!” The old man laughed with them!  He laughed without any desire to laugh, simply to do as the others did.

At last they explained.  Fromont Jeune had come in person, six months before, to collect the balance in their hands.

Sigismond felt that his strength was going.  But he summoned courage to say: 

“Ah! yes; true.  I had forgotten.  Sigismond Planus is growing old, that is plain.  I am failing, my children, I am failing.”

And the old man went away wiping his eyes, in which still glistened great tears caused by the hearty laugh he had just enjoyed.  The young people behind him exchanged glances and shook their heads.  They understood.

The blow he had received was so crushing that the cashier, as soon as he was out-of-doors, was obliged to sit down on a bench.  So that was the reason why Georges did not come to the counting-room for money.  He made his collections in person.  What had taken place at the Prochassons’ had probably been repeated everywhere else.  It was quite useless, therefore, for him to subject himself to further humiliation.  Yes, but the notes, the notes!—­that thought renewed his strength.  He wiped the perspiration from his forehead and started once more to try his luck with a customer in the faubourg.  But this time he took his precautions and called to the cashier from the doorway, without entering: 

“Good-morning, Pere So-and-So.  I want to ask you a question.”

He held the door half open, his hand upon the knob.

“When did we settle our last bill?  I forgot to enter it.”

Oh! it was a long while ago, a very long while, that their last bill was settled.  Fromont Jeune’s receipt was dated in September.  It was five months ago.

The door was hastily closed.  Another!  Evidently it would be the same thing everywhere.

“Ah!  Monsieur Chorche, Monsieur Chorche,” muttered poor Sigismond; and while he pursued his journey, with bowed head and trembling legs, Madame Fromont Jeune’s carriage passed him close, on its way to the Orleans station; but Claire did not see old Planus, any more than she had seen, when she left her house a few moments earlier, Monsieur Chebe in his long frock-coat and the illustrious Delobelle in his stovepipe hat, turning into the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes at opposite ends, each with the factory and Risler’s wallet for his objective point.  The young woman was much too deeply engrossed by what she had before her to look into the street.

Think of it!  It was horrible.  To go and ask M. Gardinois for a hundred thousand francs—­M.  Gardinois, a man who boasted that he had never borrowed or loaned a sou in his life, who never lost an opportunity to tell how, on one occasion, being driven to ask his father for forty francs to buy a pair of trousers, he had repaid the loan in small amounts.  In his dealings with everybody, even with his children, M. Gardinois followed those traditions of avarice which the earth, the cruel earth, often ungrateful to those who till it, seems to inculcate in all peasants.  The old man did not intend that any part of his colossal fortune should go to his children during his lifetime.