“You have a bill there for five hundred francs at six months; I will take that one of you,” said Chaboisseau.

Apparently at the last statement of accounts, there had been a balance of five hundred francs in favor of Fendant and Cavalier.

They went back to the classical department.  Chaboisseau made out a little memorandum, interest so much and commission so much, total deduction thirty francs, then he subtracted fifty francs for Ducerceau’s book; finally, from a cash-box full of coin, he took four hundred and twenty francs.

“Look here, though, M. Chaboisseau, the bills are either all of them good, or all bad alike; why don’t you take the rest?”

“This is not discounting; I am paying myself for a sale,” said the old man.

Etienne and Lucien were still laughing at Chaboisseau, without understanding him, when they reached Dauriat’s shop, and Etienne asked Gabusson to give them the name of a bill-broker.  Gabusson thus appealed to gave them a letter of introduction to a broker in the Boulevard Poissonniere, telling them at the same time that this was the “oddest and queerest party” (to use his own expression) that he, Gabusson, had come across.  The friends took a cab by the hour, and went to the address.

“If Samanon won’t take your bills,” Gabusson had said, “nobody else will look at them.”

A second-hand bookseller on the ground floor, a second-hand clothes-dealer on the first story, and a seller of indecent prints on the second, Samanon carried on a fourth business—­he was a money-lender into the bargain.  No character in Hoffmann’s romances, no sinister-brooding miser of Scott’s, can compare with this freak of human and Parisian nature (always admitting that Samanon was human).  In spite of himself, Lucien shuddered at the sight of the dried-up little old creature, whose bones seemed to be cutting a leather skin, spotted with all sorts of little green and yellow patches, like a portrait by Titian or Veronese when you look at it closely.  One of Samanon’s eyes was fixed and glassy, the other lively and bright; he seemed to keep that dead eye for the bill-discounting part of his profession, and the other for the trade in the pornographic curiosities upstairs.  A few stray white hairs escaping from under a small, sleek, rusty black wig, stood erect above a sallow forehead with a suggestion of menace about it; a hollow trench in either cheek defined the outline of the jaws; while a set of projecting teeth, still white, seemed to stretch the skin of the lips with the effect of an equine yawn.  The contrast between the ill-assorted eyes and grinning mouth gave Samanon a passably ferocious air; and the very bristles on the man’s chin looked stiff and sharp as pins.

Nor was there the slightest sign about him of any desire to redeem a sinister appearance by attention to the toilet; his threadbare jacket was all but dropping to pieces; a cravat, which had once been black, was frayed by contact with a stubble chin, and left on exhibition a throat as wrinkled as a turkey-gobbler’s.