Colonel Chabert | Page 3

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Etext prepared by Dagny, [email protected] and John Bickers,
[email protected]

Colonel Chabert
by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell

DEDICATION
To Madame la Comtesse Ida de Bocarme nee du Chasteler.

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 gutter-jumper--a messenger in fact--who at this
moment was eating a piece of dry bread with a hearty appetite. He
pulled off a morsel of crumb to make into a bullet, and fired it gleefully
through the open pane of the window against which he was leaning.
The pellet, well aimed, rebounded almost as high as the window, after
hitting the hat of a stranger who was crossing the courtyard of a house
in the 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 a client may be, he is still a man, hang it all!" said
the head clerk, pausing in the addition of a bill of costs.
The lawyer's messenger is commonly, as was Simonnin, a lad of
thirteen or fourteen, who, in every office, is under the special
jurisdiction of the managing clerk, whose errands and /billets-doux/
keep him employed on his way to carry writs to the bailiffs and
petitions to the Courts. He is akin to the 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 these clerklings have an old mother lodging on some fifth
floor with whom they share their pittance of thirty 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 schoolboy who has caught out his master.
And he went on eating his bread and cheese, leaning his shoulder
against the window jamb; for he rested standing like a cab-horse, one of
his legs raised and propped against the other, on the toe of his shoe.
"What trick can we play that cove?" said the third clerk, whose name
was Godeschal, in a low voice, pausing in the middle of a discourse he
was extemporizing in an appeal engrossed by the fourth clerk, of which
copies were being made by two neophytes from the provinces.
Then he went on improvising:
"/But, in his noble and beneficent wisdom, his Majesty, Louis the
Eighteenth/--(write it at full length, heh! Desroches the learned-- you,
as you engross it!)--/when he resumed the reins of Government,
understood/--(what did that old nincompoop ever understand?)--/the
high mission to which he had been called by Divine Providence!/--(a
note of admiration and six stops. They are pious enough at the Courts
to let us put six)--/and his first thought, as is proved by the date of the
order hereinafter designated, was to