Colonel Chabert

"HULLO! There is that old Box-coat again!"This exclamation was made by a lawyer's clerk of the class called in French offices a gutterjumper-a messenger in fact-who at this moment was eating a piece of dry bread with a heartyappetite.

He pulled off a morsel of crumb to make into a bullet, and fired it gleefully through theopen pane of the window against which he was leaning.

The pellet, well aimed, rebounded almost ashigh as the window, after hitting the hat of a stranger who was crossing the courtyard of a house inthe Rue Vivienne, where dwelt Maitre Derville, attorney-at-law."Come, Simonnin, don't play tricks on people, or I will turn you out of doors.

However poor aclient may be, he is still a man, hang it all!" said the head clerk, pausing in the addition of a bill ofcosts.The lawyer's messenger is commonly, as was Simonnin, a lad of thirteen or fourteen, who, inevery office, is under the special jurisdiction of the managing clerk, whose errands and billets-douxkeep him employed on his way to carry writs to the bailiffs and petitions to the Courts.

He is akin tothe street boy in his habits, and to the pettifogger by fate.

The boy is almost always ruthless,unbroken, unmanageable, a ribald rhymester, impudent, greedy, and idle. And yet, almost all theseclerklings have an old mother lodging on some fifth floor with whom they share their pittance ofthirty or forty francs a month."If he is a man, why do you call him old Box-coat?" asked Simonnin, with the air of a schoolboywho has caught out his master.And he went on eating his bread and cheese, leaning his shoulder against the window jamb; for herested standing like a cab-horse, one of his legs raised and propped against the other, on the toe ofhis shoe."What trick can we play that cove?" said the third clerk, whose name was Godeschal, in a lowvoice, pausing in the middle of a discourse he was extemporizing in an appeal engrossed by thefourth clerk, of which copies were being made by two neophytes from the provinces.