CHAPTER XXIX
THE HOUSE OF MORREL AND SON
NY one who had quitted Marseilles a few years previously, well acquainted with the interior of Morrel's house, and had returned at this date, would have found a great change.
Instead of that air of life, of comfort, and of happiness that exhales, so to speak, from a flourishing and prosperous house — instead of the merry faces seen at the windows, of the busy clerks with pens behind their ears, hurrying to and fro in the long corridors — instead of the court filled with bales of goods, reëchoing the cries and the jokes of the porters, he would have at once perceived an air of sadness and gloom.
In the deserted corridor and the empty office, out of all the numerous clerks that used to fill the office but two remained. One was a young man of three or four and twenty, named Emmanuel Raymond, who was in love with M. Morrel's daughter, and had remained with him, spite of the efforts of his friends to induce him to withdraw; the other was an old one-eyed cashier, named Cocles, a nickname given him by the young men who used to inhabit this vast bee-hive, now almost deserted, and which had so completely replaced his real name that he would not, in all probability, have replied to any one who addressed him by it.
Cocles remained in Morrel's service, and a most singular change had taken place in his situation; he had at the same time risen to the rank of cashier, and sunk to the rank of a servant. He was, however, the same Cocles, good, patient, devoted, but inflexible on the subject of arithmetic, the only point on which he would have stood firm against the world, even against Morrel, and strong in the multiplication-table, which he had at his fingers' ends, no matter what scheme or what trap was laid to catch him.
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