The end of the year, that is to say, the striking of the balance-sheet.

The balance-sheet!  That is the magic word.  All through the year we go on and on in the eddying whirl of business.  Money comes and goes, circulates, attracts other money, vanishes; and the fortune of the firm, like a slippery, gleaming snake, always in motion, expands, contracts, diminishes, or increases, and it is impossible to know our condition until there comes a moment of rest.  Not until the inventory shall we know the truth, and whether the year, which seems to have been prosperous, has really been so.

The account of stock is usually taken late in December, between Christmas and New Year’s Day.  As it requires much extra labor to prepare it, everybody works far into the night.  The whole establishment is alert.  The lamps remain lighted in the offices long after the doors are closed, and seem to share in the festal atmosphere peculiar to that last week of the year, when so many windows are illuminated for family gatherings.  Every one, even to the least important ‘employe’ of the firm, is interested in the results of the inventory.  The increases of salary, the New Year’s presents, depend upon those blessed figures.  And so, while the vast interests of a wealthy house are trembling in the balance, the wives and children and aged parents of the clerks, in their fifth-floor tenements or poor apartments in the suburbs, talk of nothing but the inventory, the results of which will make themselves felt either by a greatly increased need of economy or by some purchase, long postponed, which the New Year’s gift will make possible at last.

On the premises of Fromont Jeune and Risler Aine, Sigismond Planus is the god of the establishment at that season, and his little office a sanctuary where all the clerks perform their devotions.  In the silence of the sleeping factory, the heavy pages of the great books rustle as they are turned, and names called aloud cause search to be made in other books.  Pens scratch.  The old cashier, surrounded by his lieutenants, has a businesslike, awe-inspiring air.  From time to time Fromont Jeune, on the point of going out in his carriage, looks in for a moment, with a cigar in his mouth, neatly gloved and ready for the street.  He walks slowly, on tiptoe, puts his face to the grating: 

“Well!—­are you getting on all right?”

Sigismond gives a grunt, and the young master takes his leave, afraid to ask any further questions.  He knows from the cashier’s expression that the showing will be a bad one.

In truth, since the days of the Revolution, when there was fighting in the very courtyard of the factory, so pitiable an inventory never had been seen in the Fromont establishment.  Receipts and expenditures balanced each other.  The general expense account had eaten up everything, and, furthermore, Fromont Jeune was indebted to the firm in a large sum.  You should have seen old Planus’s air of consternation when, on the 31st of December, he went up to Georges’s office to make report of his labors.