The only decoration of the office consisted in huge yellow posters,
announcing seizures of real estate, sales, settlements under trust,
final or interim judgments,--all the glory of a lawyer's office.
Behind the head clerk was an enormous room, of which each division was
crammed with bundles of papers with an infinite number of tickets
hanging from them at the ends of red tape, which give a peculiar
physiognomy to law papers. The lower rows were filled with cardboard
boxes, yellow with use, on which might be read the names of the more
important clients whose cases were juicily stewing at this present
time. The dirty window-panes admitted but little daylight. Indeed,
there are very few offices in Paris where it is possible to write
without lamplight before ten in the morning in the month of February,
for they are all left to very natural neglect; every one comes and no
one stays; no one has any personal interest in a scene of mere routine
--neither the attorney, nor the counsel, nor the clerks, trouble
themselves about the appearance of a place which, to the youths, is a
schoolroom; to the clients, a passage; to the chief, a laboratory. The
greasy furniture is handed down to successive owners with such
scrupulous care, that in some offices may still be seen boxes of
/remainders/, machines for twisting parchment gut, and bags left by
the prosecuting parties of the Chatelet (abbreviated to /Chlet/)--a
Court which, under the old order of things, represented the present
Court of First Instance (or County Court).

So in this dark office, thick with dust, there was, as in all its
fellows, something repulsive to the clients--something which made it
one of the most hideous monstrosities of Paris. Nay, were it not for
the mouldy sacristies where prayers are weighed out and paid for like
groceries, and for the old-clothes shops, where flutter the rags that
blight all the illusions of life by showing us the last end of all our