Colonel Chabert | Page 4

went on, wetting the back fold of the sheet with his tongue, so as to be able to fold back the page of thick stamped paper, "well, if you want to play him a trick, tell him that the master can only see his clients between two and three in the morning; we shall see if he comes, the old ruffian!"
And Godeschal took up the sentence he was dictating--"/given in/--Are you ready?"
"Yes," cried the three writers.
It all went all together, the appeal, the gossip, and the conspiracy.
"/Given in/--Here, Daddy Boucard, what is the date of the order? We must dot our /i/'s and cross our /t/'s, by Jingo! it helps to fill the pages."
"By Jingo!" repeated one of the copying clerks before Boucard, the head clerk, could reply.
"What! have you written /by Jingo/?" cried Godeschal, looking at one of the novices, with an expression at once stern and humorous.
"Why, yes," said Desroches, the fourth clerk, leaning across his neighbor's copy, "he has written, '/We must dot our i's/' and spelt it /by Gingo/!"
All the clerks shouted with laughter.
"Why! Monsieur Hure, you take 'By Jingo' for a law term, and you say you come from Mortagne!" exclaimed Simonnin.
"Scratch it cleanly out," said the head clerk. "If the judge, whose business it is to tax the bill, were to see such things, he would say you were laughing at the whole boiling. You would hear of it from the chief! Come, no more of this nonsense, Monsieur Hure! A Norman ought not to write out an appeal without thought. It is the 'Shoulder arms!' of the law."
"/Given in--in/?" asked Godeschal.--"Tell me when, Boucard."
"June 1814," replied the head clerk, without looking up from his work.
A knock at the office door interrupted the circumlocutions of the prolix document. Five clerks with rows of hungry teeth, bright, mocking eyes, and curly heads, lifted their noses towards the door, after crying all together in a singing tone, "Come in!"
Boucard kept his face buried in a pile of papers--/broutilles/ (odds and ends) in French law jargon--and went on drawing out the bill of costs on which he was busy.
The office was a large room furnished with the traditional stool which is to be seen in all these dens of law-quibbling. The stove-pipe crossed the room diagonally to the chimney of a bricked-up fireplace; on the marble chimney-piece were several chunks of bread, triangles of Brie cheese, pork cutlets, glasses, bottles, and the head clerk's cup of chocolate. The smell of these dainties blended so completely with that of the immoderately overheated stove and the odor peculiar to offices and old papers, that the trail of a fox would not have been perceptible. The floor was covered with mud and snow, brought in by the clerks. Near the window stood the desk with a revolving lid, where the head clerk worked, and against the back of it was the second clerk's table. The second clerk was at this moment in Court. It was between eight and nine in the morning.
The only decoration of the office consisted in huge yellow posters, announcing seizures of real estate, sales, settlements under trust, final or interim judgments,--all the glory of a lawyer's office. Behind the head clerk was an enormous room, of which each division was crammed with bundles of papers with an infinite number of tickets hanging from them at the ends of red tape, which give a peculiar physiognomy to law papers. The lower rows were filled with cardboard boxes, yellow with use, on which might be read the names of the more important clients whose cases were juicily stewing at this present time. The dirty window-panes admitted but little daylight. Indeed, there are very few offices in Paris where it is possible to write without lamplight before ten in the morning in the month of February, for they are all left to very natural neglect; every one comes and no one stays; no one has any personal interest in a scene of mere routine --neither the attorney, nor the counsel, nor the clerks, trouble themselves about the appearance of a place which, to the youths, is a schoolroom; to the clients, a passage; to the chief, a laboratory. The greasy furniture is handed down to successive owners with such scrupulous care, that in some offices may still be seen boxes of /remainders/, machines for twisting parchment gut, and bags left by the prosecuting parties of the Chatelet (abbreviated to /Chlet/)--a Court which, under the old order of things, represented the present Court of First Instance (or County Court).
So in this dark office, thick with dust, there was, as in all its fellows, something repulsive to the clients--something which made it one of the most hideous monstrosities of Paris. Nay, were it not for the mouldy sacristies where prayers are