ier, "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 at the stove at the same moment of the day.
His sole vanity consisted in wearing an infallible watch, timed daily at
the Hotel de Ville as he passed it on his way to the office. From six
to eight o'clock in the morning he kept the books of a large shop in the
rue Saint-Antoine, and from six to eight o'clock in the evening those
of the Maison Camusot, in the rue des Bourdonnais. He thus earned three
thousand francs a year, counting his salary from the government. In a
few months his term of service would be up, when he would retire on a
pension; he therefore showed the utmost indifference to the political
intrigues of the bureaus. Like his elde