But when he returned to his rooms he was not in a state of mind to write an article that must be delivered that evening.  Among other things that he had undertaken was one, and not the least fastidious, which consisted in giving, by correspondence, advice to the subscribers of a fashion magazine, or, more exactly speaking, to recommend, in the form of medical advice, all the cosmetics, depilatories, elixirs, dyes, essences, oils, creams, soaps, pomades, toothpowders, rouges, and also all the chemists’ specialties, to which their inventors wished to give an authority that the public, which believes itself acute, refused to the simple advertisement on the last page.  With his ambition and the career before him, he would never have consented to carry on this correspondence under his own name.  He did it for a neighboring doctor, a simple man, who was not so cautious, and who signed his name to these letters, glad to get clients from any quarter.  For his trouble, Saniel took this doctor’s place during Sunday in summer, and from time to time received a box of perfumery or quack medicines, which he sold at a low price when occasion offered.

Every week he received the list of cosmetics and specialties that he must make use of in his correspondence, no matter how he recommended them, whether in answer to letters that were really addressed to him, or by inventing questions that gave him the opportunity to introduce them.

He began to consult this list and the pile of letters from subscribers that the magazine had sent him, when the doorbell rang.  Perhaps it was a patient, the good patient whom he had expected for four years.  He left his desk to open the door.

It was his coal man, who came with his bill.

“I will stop some day when I am near you,” Saniel said.  “I am in a hurry this evening.”

“And I am in a hurry, too; I must pay a large bill tomorrow, and I count upon having some money from you.”

“I have no money here.”

After a long talk he got rid of the man and returned to his desk.  He had answered but a few of the many letters when his bell rang again.  This time he would not open the door; it was a creditor, without doubt.  And he continued his correspondence.

But for four years he had waited for chance to draw him a good ticket in the lottery of life—­a rich patient afflicted with a cyst or a tumor that he would take to a fashionable surgeon, who would divide with him the ten or fifteen thousand francs that he would receive for the operation.  In that case he would be saved.

He ran to the door.  The patient with the cyst presented himself in the form of a small bearded man with a red face, wearing over his vest the wine-merchant’s apron of coarse black cloth.  In fact, it was the wine merchant from the corner, who, having heard of the officer’s visit, came to ask for the payment of his bill for furnishing wine for three months.

A scene similar to that which he had had with the coal merchant, but more violent, took place, and it was only by threatening to put him out of the door that Saniel got rid of the man, who went away declaring that he would come the next morning with an officer.