At the office he was often seen in a melancholy attitude, as though absorbed in thought, when in fact he was thinking of nothing at all.

He did not know a single person in the house where he lived, and always carried the keys of his apartment about with him.

On New-Year's day he went round and left his own cards on all the clerks of the division.

Bixiou took it into his head on one of the hottest of dog-days to put a layer of lard under the lining of a certain old hat which Poiret junior (he was, by the bye, fifty-two years old) had worn for the last nine years.

Bixiou, who had never seen any other hat on Poiret's head, dreamed of it and declared he tasted it in his food; he therefore resolved, in the interests of his digestion, to relieve the bureau of the sight of that amorphous old hat.