, and old Catherine, Madame Saillard's woman-servant,
together with the porter or his wife, stood looking on at the door of
the salon. The servants always received three francs on these occasions
to buy themselves wine or coffee.

This little circle looked upon Saillard and Baudoyer as transcendent
beings; they were government officers; they had risen by their own
merits; they worked, it was said, with the minister himself; they owed
their fortune to their talents; they were politicians. Baudoyer was
considered the more able of the two; his position as head of a bureau
presupposed labor that was more intricate and arduous than that of a
cashier. Moreover, Isidore, though the son of a leather-dresser, had had
the genius to study and to cast aside his father's business and find a
career in politics, which had led him to a post of eminence. In short,
silent and uncommunicative as he was, he was looked upon as a deep
thinker, and perhaps, said the admiring circle, he would some day
become deputy of the eighth arrondissement. As Gigonnet listened to such
remarks as these, he pressed his already pinched lips closer together,
and threw a glance at his great-niece, Elisabeth.

In person, Isidore was a tall, stout man of thirty-seven, who perspired
freely, and whose head looked as if he had water on the brain. This
enormous head, covered with chestnut hair cropped close, was joined to
the neck by rolls of flesh which overhung the collar of his coat. He had
the arms of Hercules, hands worthy of Domitian, a stomach which
sobriety held within the limits of the majestic, to use a saying of
Brillaet-Savarin. His face was a good deal like that of the Emperor
Alexander. The Tartar type was in the little eyes and the flattened nose
turned slightly up, in the frigid lips and the short chin. The forehead
was low and narrow. Though his temperament was lymphatic, the devout
Isidore was under the influence of a conjugal passion which time did not
lessen.

In spite, however, of his resemblance to the handsome Russian Emperor
and the terrible Domitian, Isidore Baudoyer was nothing more than a
political office-holder, of little ability as head of his department, a
cut-and-dried routine man, who concealed the fact that he was a flabby
cipher by so ponderous a personality that no scalpel could cut deep
enough to let the operator see into him. His severe studies, in which
he had shown the patience and sagacity of an ox, and his square head,
dec