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.

A room with a stove in it is a retort in which the power of strong men
is evaporated, where their vitality is exhausted, and their wills
enfeebled. Government offices are part of a great scheme for the
manufacture of the mediocrity necessary for the maintenance of a
Feudal System on a pecuniary basis--and money is the foundation of the
Social Contract. (See _Les Employes_.) The mephitic vapors in the
atmosphere of a crowded room contribute in no small degree to bring
about a gradual deterioration of intelligences, the brain that gives
off the largest quantity of nitrogen asphyxiates the others, in the
long run.

The cashier was a man of five-and-forty or thereabouts. As he sat at
the table, the light from a moderator lamp shining full on his bald
head and glistening fringe of iron-gray hair that surrounded it--this
baldness and the round outlines of his face made his head look very
like a ball. His complexion was brick-red, a few wrinkles had gathered
about his eyes, but he had the smooth, plump hands of a stout man. His
blue cloth coat, a little rubbed and worn, and the creases and