the orphan, and a terror to his clerks; they were not allowed to waste
a minute. Learned, crafty, double-faced, honey-tongued, never flying
into a passion, rancorous in his judicial way."

"But there is goodness in him," cried Finot; "he is devoted to his
friends. The first thing he did was to take Godeschal, Mariette's
brother, as his head-clerk."

"At Paris," said Blondet, "there are attorneys of two shades. There is
the honest man attorney; he abides within the province of the law,
pushes on his cases, neglects no one, never runs after business, gives
his clients his honest opinion, and makes them compromise on doubtful
points--he is a Derville, in short. Then there is the starveling
attorney, to whom anything seems good provided that he is sure of
expenses; he will set, not mountains fighting, for he sells them, but
planets; he will work to make the worse appear the better cause, and
take advantage of a technical error to win the day for a rogue. If one
of these fellows tries one of Maitre Gonin's tricks once too often,
the guild forces him to sell his connection. Desroches, our friend
Desroches, understood the full resources of a trade carried on in a
beggarly way enough by poor devils; he would buy up causes of men who
feared to lose the day; he plunged into chicanery with a fixed
determination to make money by it. He was right; he did his business
very honestly. He found influence among men in public life by getting
them out of awkward complications; there was our dear les Lupeaulx,
for instance, whose position was so deeply compromised. And Desroches
stood in need of influence; for when he began, he was anything but
well looked on at the court, and he who took so much trouble to
rectify the errors of his clients was often in trouble himself. See
now, Bixiou, to go back to the subject--How came Desroches to be in