officials, clustering round the stoves or before the fireplaces and shaking in their shoes, asked themselves:  “What will he do? will he increase the number of clerks? will he dismiss two to make room for three?” the cashier tranquilly took out twenty-five clean bank-bills and pinned them together with a satisfied expression on his beadle face.  The next day he mounted the private staircase and had himself ushered into the minister’s presence by the lackeys, who considered the money and the keeper of money, the contents and the container, the idea and the form, as one and the same power.  The cashier caught the ministerial pair at the dawn of official delight, when the newly appointed statesman is benign and affable.  To the minister’s inquiry as to what brings him there, he replies with the bank-notes,—­informing his Excellency that he hastens to pay him the customary indemnity.  Moreover, he explains the matter to the minister’s wife, who never fails to draw freely upon the fund, and sometimes takes all, for the “outfit” is looked upon as a household affair.  The cashier then proceeds to turn a compliment, and to slip in a few politic phrases:  “If his Excellency would deign to retain him; if, satisfied with his purely mechanical services, he would,” etc.  As a man who brings twenty-five thousand francs is always a worthy official, the cashier is sure not to leave without his confirmation to the post from which he has seen a succession of ministers come and go during a period of, perhaps, twenty-five years.  His next step is to place himself at the 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.”