of a science, he declared that the destiny of every man was written in the words or phrase given by the transposition of the letters of his names and titles; and his patriotism struggled hard to suppress the fact—­signal evidence for his theory—­that in Horatio Nelson, “honor est a Nilo.”  Ever since the accession of Charles X., he had bestowed much thought on the king’s anagram.  Thuillier, who was fond of making puns, declared that an anagram was nothing more than a pun on letters.  The sight of Colleville, a man of real feeling, bound almost indissolubly to Thuillier, the model of an egoist, presented a difficult problem to the mind of an observer.  The clerks in the offices explained it by saying, “Thuillier is rich, and the Colleville household costly.”  This friendship, however, consolidated by time, was based on feelings and on facts which naturally explained it; an account of which may be found elsewhere (see “Les Petits Bourgeois").  We may remark in passing that though Madame Colleville was well known in the bureaus, the existence of Madame Thuillier was almost unknown there.  Colleville, an active man, burdened with a family of children, was fat, round, and jolly, whereas Thuillier, “the beau of the Empire” without apparent anxieties and always at leisure, was slender and thin, with a livid face and a melancholy air.  “We never know,” said Rabourdin, speaking of the two men, “whether our friendships are born of likeness or of contrast.”

Unlike these Siamese twins, two other clerks, Chazelle and Paulmier, were forever squabbling.  One smoked, the other took snuff, and the merits of their respective use of tobacco were the origin of ceaseless disputes.  Chazelle’s home, which was tyrannized over by a wife, furnished a subject of endless ridicule to Paulmier; whereas Paulmier, a bachelor, often half-starved like Vimeux, with ragged clothes and half-concealed penury was a fruitful source of ridicule to Chazelle.  Both were beginning to show a protuberant stomach; Chazelle’s, which was round and projecting, had the impertinence, so Bixiou said, to enter the room first; Paulmier’s corporation spread to right and left.  A favorite amusement with Bixiou was to measure them quarterly.  The two clerks, by dint of quarrelling over the details of their lives, and washing much of their dirty linen at the office, had obtained the disrepute which they merited.  “Do you take me for a Chazelle?” was a frequent saying that served to end many an annoying discussion.

Monsieur Poiret junior, called “junior” to distinguish him from his brother Monsieur Poiret senior (now living in the Maison Vanquer, where Poiret junior sometimes dined, intending to end his days in the same retreat), had spent thirty years in the Civil Service.  Nature herself is not so fixed and unvarying in her evolutions as was Poiret junior in all the acts of his daily life; he always laid his things in precisely the same place, put his pen in the same rack, sat down in his seat at the same hour, warmed himself