have the silence and quiet needed for the conception of good ideas.
Since he entered the profession, you are the third person to come to
him for a consultation at this midnight hour. After coming in the
chief will discuss each case, read everything, spend four or five
hours perhaps over the business, then he will ring for me and explain
to me his intentions. In the morning from ten to two he hears what his
clients have to say, then he spends the rest of his day in
appointments. In the evening he goes into society to keep up his
connections. So he has only the night for undermining his cases,
ransacking the arsenal of the code, and laying his plan of battle. He
is determined never to lose a case; he loves his art. He will not
undertake every case, as his brethren do. That is his life, an
exceptionally active one. And he makes a great deal of money."

As he listened to this explanation, the old man sat silent, and his
strange face assumed an expression so bereft of intelligence, that the
clerk, after looking at him, thought no more about him.

A few minutes later Derville came in, in evening dress; his head clerk
opened the door to him, and went back to finish arranging the papers.
The young lawyer paused for a moment in amazement on seeing in the dim
light the strange client who awaited him. Colonel Chabert was as
absolutely immovable as one of the wax figures in Curtius' collection
to which Godeschal had proposed to treat his fellow-clerks. This
quiescence would not have been a subject for astonishment if it had
not completed the supernatural aspect of the man's whole person. The
old soldier was dry and lean. His forehead, intentionally hidden under
a smoothly combed wig, gave him a look of mystery. His eyes seemed
shrouded in a transparent film; you would have compared them to dingy
mother-of-pearl with a blue iridescence changing in the gleam of the