both. He owed the accuracy of his perception and his
consummate art to an extreme keenness after gain. He desired wealth, not
for his wife, not for his children, not for himself, not for his family,
not for the reputation that money gives; after the gratification of his
revenge (the hope of which kept him alive) he loved the touch of money,
like Nucingen, who, it was said, kept fingering the gold in his pockets.
The rush of business was Gaubertin's wine; and though he had his belly
full of it, he had all the eagerness of one who was empty. As with
valets of the drama, intrigues, tricks to play, mischief to organize,
deceptions, commercial over-reachings, accounts to render and receive,
disputes, and quarrels of self-interest, exhilarated him, kept his
blood in circulation, and his bile flowing. He went and came on foot,
on horseback, in a carriage, by water; he was at all auctions and timber
sales in Paris, thinking of everything, keeping hundreds of wires in his
hands and never getting them tangled.

Quick, decided in his movements as in his ideas, short and squat in
figure, with a thin nose, a fiery eye, an ear on the "qui vive," there
was something of the hunting-dog about him. His brown face, very round
and sunburned, from which the tanned ears stood out predominantly,--for
he always wore a cap,--was in keeping with that character. His nose
turned up; his tightly-closed lips could never have opened to say a
kindly thing. His bushy whiskers formed a pair of black and shiny tufts
beneath the highly-colored cheek-bones, and were lost in his cravat.
Hair that was pepper-and-salt in color and frizzled naturally in stages
like those of a judge's wig, seeming scorched by the fury of the fire
which heated his brown skull and gleamed in his gray eyes surrounded
by circular wrinkles (no doubt from a habit of always blinking when
he looked across the country in full sunlight), completed the
characteristics of his physiognomy. His lean and vigorous hands were
hairy, knobbed, and claw-like, like those of men who do their share of
labor. His personality was agreeable to those with whom he had to do,
for he wrapped it in a misleading gayety; he knew how to talk a great
deal without saying a word of what he meant to keep unsaid. He wrote
little, so as to deny anything that escaped him which might prove
unfavorable in its after effects upon his interests. His books and
papers were kept by a cashier,--an honest man, whom men of Gaube