Part 3

“I bet you he is a nobleman,” cried Boucard.

“I bet you he has been a porter,” retorted Godeschal. “Only porters are gifted by nature with shabby box-coats, as worn and greasy and frayed as that old body’s. And did you see his trodden-down boots that let the water in, and his stock which serves for a shirt? He has slept in a dry arch.”

“He may be of noble birth, and yet have pulled the doorlatch,” cried Desroches. “It has been known!”

“No,” Boucard insisted, in the midst of laughter, “I maintain that he was a brewer in 1789, and a colonel in the time of the Republic.”

“I bet theatre tickets round that he never was a soldier,” said Godeschal.

“Done with you,” answered Boucard.

“Monsieur! Monsieur!” shouted the little messenger, opening the window.

“What are you at now, Simonnin?” asked Boucard.

“I am calling him that you may ask him whether he is a colonel or a porter; he must know.”

All the clerks laughed. As to the old man, he was already coming upstairs again.

“What can we say to him?” cried Godeschal.

“Leave it to me,” replied Boucard.

The poor man came in nervously, his eyes cast down, perhaps not to betray how hungry he was by looking too greedily at the eatables.

“Monsieur,” said Boucard, “will you have the kindness to leave your name, so that M. Derville may know----”

“Chabert.”

“The Colonel who was killed at Eylau?” asked Hure, who, having so far said nothing, was jealous of adding a jest to all the others.

“The same, monsieur,” replied the good man, with antique simplicity. And he went away.

“Whew!”

“Done brown!”

“Poof!”

“Oh!”

“Ah!”

“Boum!”

“The old rogue!”

“Ting-a-ring-ting!”

“Sold again!”

“Monsieur Desroches, you are going to the play without paying,” said Hure to the fourth clerk, giving him a slap on the shoulder that might have killed a rhinoceros.

There was a storm of cat-calls, cries, and exclamations, which all the onomatopeia of the language would fail to represent.