"That's best; seven o'clock; nobody will be there then."

Dutocq advanced alone into the midst of that congress of beggars, and
he heard his own name repeated from mouth to mouth, for he could
hardly fail to encounter among them some jail-bird familiar with the
judge's office, just as Theodose was certain to have met a client.

In these quarters the justice-of-peace is the supreme authority; all
legal contests stop short at his office, especially since the law was
passed giving to those judges sovereign power in all cases of
litigation involving not over one hundred and forty francs. A way was
made for the judge's clerk, who was not less feared than the judge
himself. He saw women seated on the staircase; a horrible display of
pallor and suffering of many kinds. Dutocq was almost asphyxiated when
he opened the door of the room in which already sixty persons had left
their odors.

"Your number? your number?" cried several voices.

"Hold your jaw!" cried a gruff voice from the street, "that's the pen
of the judge."

Profound silence followed. Dutocq found his copying clerk clothed in a
jacket of yellow leather like that of the gloves of the gendarmerie,
beneath which he wore an ignoble waistcoat of knitted wool. The reader
must imagine the man's diseased head issuing from this species of
scabbard and covered with a miserable Madras handkerchief, which,
leaving to view the forehead and neck, gave to that head, by the gleam
of a tallow candle of twelve to the pound, its naturally hideous and
threatening character.