well-known livery of the State, blue coat with red pipings for
undress, and broad red, white, and blue braid for great occasions. La
Billardiere's man had the air of a gentleman-usher, an innovation
which gave an aspect of dignity to the division.

Pillars of the ministry, experts in all manners and customs
bureaucratic, well-warmed and clothed at the State's expense, growing
rich by reason of their few wants, these lackeys saw completely
through the government officials, collectively and individually. They
had no better way of amusing their idle hours than by observing these
personages and studying their peculiarities. They knew how far to
trust the clerks with loans of money, doing their various commissions
with absolute discretion; they pawned and took out of pawn, bought up
bills when due, and lent money without interest, albeit no clerk ever
borrowed of them without returning a "gratification." These servants
without a master received a salary of nine hundred francs a year; new
years' gifts and "gratifications" brought their emoluments to twelve
hundred francs, and they made almost as much money by serving
breakfasts to the clerks at the office.

The elder of these men, who was also the richest, waited upon the main
body of the clerks. He was sixty years of age, with white hair cropped
short like a brush; stout, thickset, and apoplectic about the neck,
with a vulgar pimpled face, gray eyes, and a mouth like a furnace
door; such was the profile portrait of Antoine, the oldest attendant
in the ministry. He had brought his two nephews, Laurent and Gabriel,
from Echelles in Savoie,--one to serve the heads of the bureaus, the
other the director himself. All three came to open the offices and
clean them, between seven and eight o'clock in the morning; at which
time they read the newspapers and talked civil service politics from