francs for himself, and with the few sous left he could not go to a
resttaurant, not even the lowest and cheapest. He could only buy some
bread for his supper, and eat it while working, as he had often done
before.

But when he returned to his rooms he was not in a state of mind to write
an article that must be delivered that evening. Among other things that
he had undertaken was one, and not the least fastidious, which consisted
in giving, by correspondence, advice to the subscribers of a fashion
magazine, or, more exactly speaking, to recommend, in the form of medical
advice, all the cosmetics, depilatories, elixirs, dyes, essences, oils,
creams, soaps, pomades, toothpowders, rouges, and also all the chemists'
specialties, to which their inventors wished to give an authority that
the public, which believes itself acute, refused to the simple
advertisement on the last page. With his ambition and the career before
him, he would never have consented to carry on this correspondence under
his own name. He did it for a neighboring doctor, a simple man, who was
not so cautious, and who signed his name to these letters, glad to get
clients from any quarter. For his trouble, Saniel took this doctor's
place during Sunday in summer, and from time to time received a box of
perfumery or quack medicines, which he sold at a low price when occasion
offered.

Every week he received the list of cosmetics and specialties that he must
make use of in his correspondence, no matter how he recommended them,
whether in answer to letters that were really addressed to him, or by
inventing questions that gave him the opportunity to introduce them.

He began to consult this list and the pile of letters from subscribers
that the magazine had sent him, when the doorbell rang. Perhaps it was a