If the cashier is possessed of an imagination or of a fervid
temperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete
cashier, he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has
ambitions, or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is
undone. Search the chronicles of the counting-house. You will not find
a single instance of a cashier attaining _a position_, as it is called.
They are sent to the hulks; they go to foreign parts; they vegetate on
a second floor in the Rue Saint-Louis among the market gardens of the
Marais. Some day, when the cashiers of Paris come to a sense of their
real value, a cashier will be hardly obtainable for money. Still,
certain it is that there are people who are fit for nothing but to be
cashiers, just as the bent of a certain order of mind inevitably makes
for rascality. But, oh marvel of our civilization! Society rewards
virtue with an income of a hundred louis in old age, a dwelling on a
second floor, bread sufficient, occasional new bandana handkerchiefs,
an elderly wife and her offspring.
So much for virtue. But for the opposite course, a little boldness, a
faculty for keeping on the windward side of the law, as Turenne
outflanked Montecuculi, and Society will sanction the theft of
millions, shower ribbons upon the thief, cram him with honors, and
smother him with consideration.
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