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