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.