Colleville had a passion for reading the horoscopes of famous men in
the anagram of their names. He passed whole months in decomposing and
recomposing words and fitting them to new meanings. "Un Corse la
finira," found within the words, "Revolution Francaise"; "Eh, c'est
large nez," in "Charles Genest," an abbe at the court of Louis XIV.,
whose huge nose is recorded by Saint-Simon as the delight of the Duc
de Bourgogne (the exigencies of this last anagram required the
substitution of a z for an s),--were a never-ending marvel to
Colleville. Raising the anagram to the height 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