CHAPTER IV.
THE OFFICE.The office of M. Ferrand resembled all other offices, and his clerks all other clerks. It was approached through an antechamber, furnished with four old chairs. In the office, properly so-called, surrounded by rows of shelves, ornamented with pasteboard boxes, containing the papers of the clients of M. Ferrand, five young men, stooping over black wooden desks, were laughing, gossiping, or scribbling perpetually. A waiting-room, also filled with pasteboard boxes, and in which the chief clerk was constantly stationed, and another room, which, for greater secrecy, was kept unoccupied, between the notary’s private room and the waiting-room, completed the total of this laboratory of deeds of every description.
An old cuckoo-clock, placed between the two windows of the o
