During my absence a place had been offered me as second or third clerk, I do not know exactly which, with M. Lefèvre, a lawyer at Crespy. It was a very desirable place, because the clerks were lodged and boarded. My keep had become such a burden on my poor mother, that she consented for the second time to part with me in order to save my food. She made up my little bit of packingnot much bigger than a Savoyard's on leaving his mountainsand off I set. It was three and a half leagues from Villers-Cotterets to Crespy: I did the journey on foot one fine evening, and I duly arrived at M. Lefèvre's.
M. Lefèvre was, at that period, a fairly good-looking man of thirty-four or thirty-five, with dark brown hair, a very pale complexion, and a well-worn appearance physically. You could recognise he was a man who had lived a long while in Paris, who had taken many permissible pleasures, and still more forbidden ones. Although M. Lefèvre was confined to a little provincial town, he might be styled a lawyer of the old school: he had ceremonious ways with his clients, ceremonious manners with us, lofty domineering airs with the world at large. M. Lefèvre seemed to say to all those who had business with him, "Pray appreciate the honour I am bestowing upon you and your town, in condescending to be a lawyer in the capital of a canton when I might have been in practice in Paris."
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