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Updated: May 27, 2025
According to the regulations, there are twelve of us employed at the Territorial Bank, including the governor and the handsome Moessard, manager of Financial Truth; but more than half of that number were wanting. To begin with, since Truth ceased to be issued it is two years since its last appearance M. Moessard has not once set foot in the place.
It was the third attack of that sort that the Messager had published within a week, and that rascal Moëssard was malicious enough to send a copy of each number under cover to Place Vendôme.
Naturally they were talking about the famous article, an article by Moëssard, it seems, full of shocking disclosures concerning all sorts of degrading occupations that the Nabob was engaged in fifteen or twenty years ago, at the time of his first stay in Paris.
Beside a painted woman, with red hair and wearing a tiny hat with wide strings, who, perched on her leathern cushion, sat leaning stiffly forward, hands, eyes, her whole factitious person intent on driving the horse, there sat, pink and made-up also, grown fat with the same vices, Moessard, the handsome Moessard the harlot and the journalist; and of the two, it was not the woman who had sold herself the most.
Whereupon everybody was contented. One would say to another, "It is making progress," as though merely an ordinary enterprise was in question. No, in good truth, there is only one Paris, where one can see such things. Positively it makes your head turn sometimes. In a word, Moessard, one fine morning, ceased coming to the office.
Show me your books, you pack of rascals! If he treated Moëssard in that fashion, I don't wonder that he takes his revenge in his newspaper." "But what does the article say, anyway?" inquired M. Barreau; "who has read it?" No one answered. Several had tried to buy the paper; but in Paris anything scandalous sells like hot cakes.
You have long teeth, young man; we must file them a bit." They exchanged these words as they walked along, pushed by the crowd which flocked like sheep through the door of exit. Moëssard stopped: "That is your last word?" The Nabob hesitated a second, seized by a presentiment of evil at sight of that pale, wicked mouth; then he remembered the promise he had given his friend.
Now, whose turn is it? The journalist Moëssard comes to get his pay for the article in the Messager; the Nabob will learn what it costs to be called "the benefactor of infancy" in the morning papers. The provincial curé asks for funds to rebuild his church, and takes his check by assault with the brutality of a Peter the Hermit.
About a week after his adventure with Moëssard, a new complication in his sadly muddled affairs, Jansoulet, on leaving the Chamber one Thursday, ordered his coachman to drive him to the hôtel de Mora.
"Let some one go at once and get me a Messager," said the Nabob to the servant behind his chair. Moëssard interposed: "That isn't necessary; I must have the thing about me."
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