Sometimes the clients would sell to each other (as hackney-coachmen do on the cabstands), head numbers for tail numbers.

On certain days, when the market business was pressing, a head number was often sold for a glass of brandy and a sou.

The numbers, as they issued from Cerizet's office, called up the succeeding numbers; and if any disputes arose Cadenet put a stop to the fray at once my remarking:-- "If you get the police here you won't gain anything; _he_'ll shut up shop." HE was Cerizet's name.

When, in the course of the day, some hapless woman, without an atom of food in her room, and seeing her children pale with hunger, would come to borrow ten or twenty sous, she would say to the wine-merchant anxiously:-- "Is _he_ there ?" Cadenet, a short, stout man, dressed in blue, with outer sleeves of black stuff and a wine-merchant's apron, and always wearing a cap, seemed an angel to these mothers when he replied to them:-- "_He_ told me that you were an honest woman and I might give you forty sous.

You know what you must do about it--" And, strange to say, _he_ was blessed by these poor people, even as they had lately blessed Popinot.
But Cerizet was cursed on Sunday mornings when accounts were settled; and they cursed him even more on Saturdays, when it was necessary to work in order to repay the sum borrowed with interest.