 he liked to
know how things were done; it gratified him to learn what taxes were paid, what
profits were gathered, what commercial habits prevailed, how the battle of life
was fought. M. Nioche, as a reduced capitalist, was familiar with these
considerations, and he formulated his information, which he was proud to be able
to impart, in the neatest possible terms and with a pinch of snuff between
finger and thumb. As a Frenchman - quite apart from Newman's napoleons - M.
Nioche loved conversation, and even in his decay his urbanity had not grown
rusty. As a Frenchman, too, he could give a clear account of things, and - still
as a Frenchman - when his knowledge was at fault he could supply its lapses with
the most convenient and ingenious hypotheses. The little shrunken financier was
intensely delighted to have questions asked him, and he scraped together
information, by frugal processes, and took notes, in his little greasy
pocket-book, of incidents which might interest his munificent friend. He read
old almanacs at the book-stalls on the quays, and he began to frequent another
café, where more newspapers were taken and his post-prandial demitasse cost him
a penny extra, and where he used to con the tattered sheets for curious
anecdotes, freaks of nature, and strange coincidences. He would relate with
solemnity the next morning that a child of five years of age had lately died at
Bordeaux, whose brain had been found to weigh sixty ounces - the brain of a
Napoleon or a Washington! or that Madame P--, charcutière in the Rue de Clichy,
had found in the wadding of an old petticoat the sum of three hundred and sixty
francs, which she had lost five years before. He pronounced his words with great
distinctness and sonority, and Newman assured him that his way of dealing with
the French tongue was very superior to the bewildering chatter that he heard in
other mouths. Upon this M. Nioche's accent became more finely trenchant than
ever; he offered to read extracts from Lamartine, and he protested that,
although he did endeavour according to his feeble lights to cultivate refinement
of diction, monsieur, if he wanted the real thing, should go to the Théâtre
Français.
    Newman took an interest in French thriftiness and conceived a lively
admiration for Parisian economies. His own economic genius was so entirely for
operations on a larger scale, and, to move at his ease, he needed so
imperatively the sense of great risks and great prizes, that he found an
ungrudging entertainment in the spectacle of fortunes made by the
