This is an exact statement of the relations between Talent and Probity on the one hand, and Government and Society on the other, in an age that considers itself to be progressive.  Without this prefatory explanation a recent occurrence in Paris would seem improbable; but preceded by this summing up of the situation, it will perhaps receive some thoughtful attention from minds capable oL recognizing the real plague spots of our civilization, a civilization which since 1815 has been moved by the spirit of gain rather than by principles of honor.

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About five o’clock, on a dull autumn afternoon, the cashier of one of the largest banks in Paris was still at his desk, working by the light of a lamp that had been lit for some time.  In accordance with the use and wont of commerce, the counting-house was in the darkest corner of the low-ceiled and far from spacious mezzanine floor, and at the very end of a passage lighted only by borrowed lights.  The office doors along this corridor, each with its label, gave the place the look of a bath-house.  At four o’clock the stolid porter had proclaimed, according to his orders, “The bank is closed.”  And by this time the departments were deserted, the letters dispatched, the clerks had taken their leave.  The wives of the partners in the firm were expecting their lovers; the two bankers dining with their mistresses.  Everything was in order.

The place where the strong boxes had been bedded in sheet iron was just behind the little sanctum, where the cashier was busy.  Doubtless he was balancing his books.  The open front gave a glimpse of a safe of hammered iron, so enormously heavy (thanks to the science of the modern inventor) that burglars could not carry it away.  The door only opened at the pleasure of those who knew its password.  The letter-lock was a warden who kept its own secret and could not be bribed; the mysterious word was an ingenious realization of the “Open sesame!” in the Arabian Nights.  But even this was as nothing.  A man might discover the password; but unless he knew the lock’s final secret, the ultima ratio of this gold-guarding dragon of mechanical science, it discharged a blunderbuss at his head.

The door of the room, the walls of the room, the shutters of the windows in the room, the whole place, in fact, was lined with sheet iron a third of an inch in thickness, concealed behind the thin wooden paneling.  The shutters had been closed, the door had been shut.  If ever man could feel confident that he was absolutely alone, and that there was no remote possibility of being watched by prying eyes, that man was the cashier of the house of Nucingen and Company in the Rue Saint-Lazare.

Accordingly the deepest silence prevailed in that iron cave.  The fire had died out in the stove, but the room was full of that tepid warmth which produces the dull heavy-headedness and nauseous queasiness of a morning after an orgy.  The stove is a mesmerist that plays no small part in the reduction of bank clerks and porters to a state of idiocy.