poetic eccentricities and of useless brutality and compromising cruelty. He likened his workers to beings of an inferior race, to beasts of burden that he worked for his personal gain. He was a frigid positivist, a perfect money-making machine, without the slightest inopportune vibration, without any sentimental fancies, never deviating by the thousandth part of a second. With him nothing was unforeseen. His conscience represented a superb sextant, a magnificent instrument of precision. If he was virtuous, it was because of his dignity and his aversion to all irregularity, scandal and publicity, and also because he had found it true of human life that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. It was virtue of a purely abstract order.
If he disapproved of the uproar of his too hasty acolyte, it was in the name of equilibrium, of good order, because of his respect for the proper alignment, for the golden mean, because he wished to preserve appearances and a nicely adjusted symmetry.
When he walked around the factory, which he did only upon rare occasions, as, for instance, when it was necessary to experiment with or apply some new invention, he often found himself astonished at the absence of a face to which he had become accustomed.
"Hm!" he would say to his partner, "I don't see old Jeff around any more!"
"Cleared out!" replied Saint-Fardier, with a gesture as sharp as a chopper.
"And why?" Dobouziez objected. "A man who has worked for us for twenty years."
"Peuh! He drank … He became careless and negligent. What?"
"Really? And his successor?"
