orders of Madame; he brings the monthly thirteen thousand francs
whenever wanted; he advances or delays the payment as requested, and
thus manages to obtain, as they said in the monasteries, a voice in
the chapter.

Formerly book-keeper at the Treasury, when that establishment kept its
books by double entry, the Sieur Saillard was compensated for the loss
of that position by his appointment as cashier of a ministry. He was a
bulky, fat man, very strong in the matter of book-keeping, and very
weak in everything else; round as a round O, simple as how-do-you-do,
--a man who came to his office with measured steps, like those of an
elephant, and returned with the same measured tread to the place
Royale, where he lived on the ground-floor of an old mansion belonging
to him. He usually had a companion on the way in the person of
Monsieur Isidore Baudoyer, head of a bureau in Monsieur de la
Billardiere's division, consequently one of Rabourdin's colleagues.
Baudoyer was married to Elisabeth Saillard, the cashier's only
daughter, and had hired, very naturally, the apartments above those of
his father-in-law. No one at the ministry had the slightest doubt that
Saillard was a blockhead, but neither had any one ever found out how
far his stupidity could go; it was too compact to be examined; it did
not ring hollow; it absorbed everything and gave nothing out. Bixiou
(a clerk of whom more anon) caricatured the cashier by drawing a head
in a wig at the top of an egg, and two little legs at the other end,
with this inscription: "Born to pay out and take in without
blundering. A little less luck, and he might have been lackey to the
bank of France; a little more ambition, and he could have been
honorably discharged."

At the moment of which we are now writing, the minister was looking at