I am dying of hunger." But three days before, Saniel emptied his purse to soothe his upholsterer by an instalment as large as he was able to make it, keeping only five francs for himself, and with the few sous left he could not go to a restaurant, 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.