T

ellson’s Bank, established in the Saint Germain Quarter of

Paris, was in a wing of a large house, approached by a

court-yard and shut off from the street by a high wall and

a strong gate. The house belonged to a great nobleman who had

lived in it until he made a flight from the troubles, in his own

cook’s dress, and got across the borders. A mere beast of the chase

flying from hunters, he was still in his metempsychosis no other

than the same Monseigneur, the preparation of whose chocolate

for whose lips had once occupied three strong men besides the

cook in question.

Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving

themselves from the sin of having drawn his high wages, by being

more than ready and willing to cut his throat on the altar of the

drawing Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality,

Fraternity, or Death, Monseigneur’s house had been first

sequestrated, and then confiscated. For, all things move so fast,

and decree following decree with that fierce precipitation, that

now upon the third night of the autumn month of September,

patriot emissaries of the law were in possession of Monseigneur’s

house, and had marked it with the tricolour, and were drinking

brandy in its state apartments.

A place of business in London like Tellson’s place of business in

Paris, would soon have driven the House out of its mind and into

the Gazette. For, what would staid British responsibility and

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respectability have said to orange-trees in boxes in a Bank courtyard,

and even to a Cupid over the counter? Yet such things were.

Tellson’s had whitewashed the Cupid, but he was still to be seen

on the ceiling, in the coolest linen, aiming (as he very often does)

at money from morning to night. Bankruptcy must inevitably have

come of this young Pagan, in Lombard-street, London, and also of

a curtained alcove in the rear of the immortal boy, and also of a

looking-glass let into the wall, and also of clerks not at all old, who

danced in public on the slightest provocation. Yet, a French

Tellson’s could get on with these things exceedingly well, and, as

long as the times held together, no man had taken fright at them,

and drawn out his money.

What money would be drawn out of Tellson’s henceforth, and

what would lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels

would tarnish in Tellson’s hiding-places, while the depositors

rusted in prisons, and when they should have violently perished;

how many accounts with Tellson’s never to be balanced in this

world, must be carried over into the next; no man could have said,

that night, any more than Mr. Jarvis Lorry could, though he

thought heavily of these questions. He sat by a newly-lighted wood

fire (the blighted and unfruitful year was prematurely cold), and

on his honest and courageous face there was a deeper shade than

the pendent lamp could throw, or any object in the room

distortedly reflecta shade of horror.