Pillars of the ministry, experts in all manners and customs bureaucratic, well-warmed and clothed at the State’s expense, growing rich by reason of their few wants, these lackeys saw completely through the government officials, collectively and individually.  They had no better way of amusing their idle hours than by observing these personages and studying their peculiarities.  They knew how far to trust the clerks with loans of money, doing their various commissions with absolute discretion; they pawned and took out of pawn, bought up bills when due, and lent money without interest, albeit no clerk ever borrowed of them without returning a “gratification.”  These servants without a master received a salary of nine hundred francs a year; new years’ gifts and “gratifications” brought their emoluments to twelve hundred francs, and they made almost as much money by serving breakfasts to the clerks at the office.

The elder of these men, who was also the richest, waited upon the main body of the clerks.  He was sixty years of age, with white hair cropped short like a brush; stout, thickset, and apoplectic about the neck, with a vulgar pimpled face, gray eyes, and a mouth like a furnace door; such was the profile portrait of Antoine, the oldest attendant in the ministry.  He had brought his two nephews, Laurent and Gabriel, from Echelles in Savoie,—­one to serve the heads of the bureaus, the other the director himself.  All three came to open the offices and clean them, between seven and eight o’clock in the morning; at which time they read the newspapers and talked civil service politics from their point of view with the servants of other divisions, exchanging the bureaucratic gossip.  In common with servants of modern houses who know their masters’ private affairs thoroughly, they lived at the ministry like spiders at the centre of a web, where they felt the slightest jar of the fabric.

On a Thursday evening, the day after the ministerial reception and Madame Rabourdin’s evening party, just as Antoine was trimming his beard and his nephews were assisting him in the antechamber of the division on the upper floor, they were surprised by the unexpected arrival of one of the clerks.

“That’s Monsieur Dutocq,” said Antoine.  “I know him by that pickpocket step of his.  He is always moving round on the sly, that man.  He is on your back before you know it.  Yesterday, contrary to his usual ways, he outstayed the last man in the office; such a thing hasn’t happened three times since he has been at the ministry.”

Here follows the portrait of Monsieur Dutocq, order-clerk in the Rabourdin bureau:  Thirty-eight years old, oblong face and bilious skin, grizzled hair always cut close, low forehead, heavy eyebrows meeting together, a crooked nose and pinched lips; tall, the right shoulder slightly higher than the left; brown coat, black waistcoat, silk cravat, yellowish trousers, black woollen stockings, and shoes with flapping bows; thus you behold him.