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                The Bureau d'Exchange de Maux

                       by Lord Dunsany


I often think of the Bureau d'Exchange de Maux and the
wondrously evil old man that sate therein.  It stood in a
little street that there is in Paris, its doorway made of
three brown beams of wood, the top one overlapping the
others like the Greek letter pi, all the rest painted green,
a house far lower and narrower than its neighbours and
infinitely stranger, a thing to take one's fancy.  And over
the doorway on the old brown beam in faded yellow letters
this legend ran, Bureau Universel d'Exchanges de Maux.
   I entered at once and accosted the listless man that
lolled on a stool by his counter.  I demanded the wherefore
of his wonderful house, what evil wares he exchanged, with
many other things that I wished to know, for curiosity led
me; and indeed had it not I had gone at once from that shop,
for there was so evil a look in that fattened man, in the
hang of his fallen cheeks and his sinful eye, that you would
have said he had had dealings with Hell and won the
advantage by sheer wickedness.
   Such a man was mine host; but above all the evil of him
lay in his eyes, which lay so still, so apathetic, that you
would have sworn that he was drugged or dead; like lizards
motionless on a wall they lay, then suddenly they darted,
and all his cunning flamed up and revealed itself in what
one moment before seemed no more than a sleepy and ordinary
wicked old man.  And this was the object and trade of that
peculiar shop, the Bureau Universel d'Exchange de Maux: you
paid twenty francs, which the old man proceeded to take from
me, for admission to the bureau and then had the right to
exchange any evil or misfortune with anyone on the premises
for some evil or misfortune that he "could afford," as the
old man put it.
   There were four or five men in the dingy ends of that
low-ceilinged room who gesticulated and muttered softly in
twos as men who make a bargain, and now and then more came
in, and the eyes of the flabby owner of the house leaped up
at them as they entered, seemed to know their errands at
once and each one's particular need, and fell back again
into somnolence, receiving his twenty francs in an almost
lifeless hand and biting the coin as though in pure absence
of mind.
   "Some of my clients," he told me.  So amazing to me was
the trade of this extraordinary shop that I engaged the old
man in conversation, repulsive though he was, and from his
garrulity I gathered these facts.  He spoke in perfect
English though his utterance was somewhat thick and heavy;
no language seemed to come amiss to him.  He had been in
business a great many years, how many he would not say, and
was far older than he looked.  All kinds of people did
business in his shop.  What they exchanged with each other
he did not care except that it had to be evils, he was not
empowered to carry on any other kind of business.
   There was no evil, he told me, that was not negotiable
there; no evil the old man knew had ever been taken away in
despair from his shop.  A man might have to wait and come
back again next day, and next day and the day after, paying
twenty francs each time, but the old man had the addresses
of all his clients and shrewdly knew their needs, and soon
the right two met and eagerly exchanged their commodities.
"Commodities" was the old man's terrible word, said with a
gruesome smack of his heavy lips, for he took a pride in his
business and evils to him were goods.
   I learned from him in ten minutes very much of human
nature, more than I have ever learned from any other man; I
learned from him that a man's own evil is to him the worst
thing there is or ever could be, and that an evil so
unbalances all men's minds that they always seek for
extremes in that small grim shop.  A woman that had no
children had exchanged with an impoverished half-maddened
creature with twelve.  On one occasion a man had exchanged
wisdom for folly.
   "Why on earth did he do that?" I said.
   "None of my business," the old man answered in his heavy
indolent way.  He merely took his twenty francs from each
and ratified the agreement in the little room at the back
opening out of the shop where his clients do business.
Apparently the man that had parted with wisdom had left the
shop upon the tips of his toes with a happy though foolish
expression all over his face, but the other went
thoughtfully away wearing a troubled and very puzzled look.
Almost always it seemed they did business in opposite evils.
   But the thing that puzzled me most in all my talks with
that unwieldy man, the thing that puzzles me still, is that
none that had once done business in that shop ever returned
again; a man might come day after day for many weeks, but
once do business and he never returned; so much the old man
told me, but when I asked him why, he only muttered that he
did not know.
   It was to discover the wherefore of this strange thing
and for no other reason at all that I determined myself to
do business sooner or later in the little room at the back
of that mysterious shop.  I determined to exchange some very
trivial evil for some evil equally slight, to seek for
myself an advantage so very small as scarcely to give Fate
as it were a grip, for I deeply distrusted these bargains,
knowing well that man has never yet benefited by the
marvellous and that the more miraculous his advantage
appears to be the more securely and tightly do the gods or
the witches catch him.  In a few days more I was going back
to England and I was beginning to fear that I should be
sea-sick: this fear of sea-sickness, not the actual malady
but only the mere fear of it, I decided to exchange for a
suitably little evil.  I did not know with whom I should be
dealing, who in reality was the head of the firm (one never
does when shopping) but I decided that neither Jew nor Devil
could make very much on so small a bargain as that.
   I told the old man my project, and he scoffed at the
smallness of my commodity trying to urge me to some darker
bargain, but could not move me from my purpose.  And then he
told me tales with a somewhat boastful air of the big
business, the great bargains that had passed through his
hands.  A man had once run in there to try and exchange
death, he had swallowed poison by accident and had only
twelve hours to live.  That sinister old man had been able
to oblige him.  A client was willing to exchange the
commodity.
   "But what did he give in exchange for death?" I said.
   "Life," said that grim old man with a furtive chuckle.
   "It must have been a horrible life," I said.
   "That was not my affair," the proprietor said, lazily
rattling together as he spoke a little pocketful of
twenty-franc pieces.
   Strange business I watched in that shop for the next few
days, the exchange of odd commodities, and heard strange
mutterings in corners amongst couples who presently rose and
went to the back room, the old man following to ratify.
   Twice a day for a week I paid my twenty francs, watching
life with its great needs and its little needs morning and
afternoon spread out before me in all its wonderful variety.
   And one day I met a comfortable man with only a little
need, he seemed to have the very evil I wanted.  He always
feared the lift was going to break.  I knew too much of
hydraulics to fear things as silly as that, but it was not
my business to cure his ridiculous fear.  Very few words
were needed to convince him that mine was the evil for him,
he never crossed the sea, and I on the other hand could
always walk upstairs, and I also felt at the time, as many
must feel in that shop, that so absurd a fear could never
trouble me.  And yet at times it is almost the curse of my
life.  When we both had signed the parchment in the spidery
back room and the old man had signed and ratified (for which
we had to pay him fifty francs each) I went back to my
hotel, and there I saw the deadly thing in the basement.
They asked me if I would go upstairs in the lift, from force
of habit I risked it, and I held my breath all the way and
clenched my hands.  Nothing will induce me to try such a
journey again.  I would sooner go up to my room in a
balloon.  And why?  Because if a balloon goes wrong you have
a chance, it may spread out into a parachute after it has
burst, it may catch in a tree, a hundred and one things may
happen, but if the lift falls down its shaft you are done.
As for sea-sickness I shall never be sick again, I cannot
tell you why except that I know that it is so.
   And the shop in which I made this remarkable bargain, the
shop to which none return when their business is done: I set
out for it next day.  Blindfold I could have found my way to
the unfashionable quarter out of which a mean street runs,
where you take the alley at the end, whence runs the cul de
sac where the queer shop stood.  A shop with pillars, fluted
and painted red, stands on its near side, its other
neighbour is a low-class jeweller's with little silver
brooches in the window.  In such incongruous company stood
the shop with beams with its walls painted green.
   In half an hour I found the cul de sac to which I had
gone twice a day for the last week, I found the shop with
the ugly painted pillars and the jeweller that sold
brooches, but the green house with the three beams was gone.
   Pulled down, you will say, although in a single night.
That can never be the answer to the mystery, for the house
of the fluted pillars painted on plaster and the low-class
jeweller's shop with its silver brooches (all of which I
could identify one by one) were standing side by side.