Colleville had a passion for reading the horoscopes of famous men in the anagram of their names. He passed whole months in decomposing and recomposing words and fitting them to new meanings. “Un Corse la finira,” found within the words, “Revolution Francaise”; “Eh, c’est large nez,” in “Charles Genest,” an abbe at the court of Louis XIV., whose huge nose is recorded by Saint-Simon as the delight of the Duc de Bourgogne (the exigencies of this last anagram required the substitution of a z for an s),--were a never-ending marvel to Colleville. Raising the anagram to the height of a science, he declared that the destiny of every man was written in the words or phrase given by the transposition of the letters of his names and titles; and his patriotism struggled hard to suppress the fact--signal evidence for his theory--that in Horatio Nelson, “honor est a Nilo.” Ever since the accession of Charles X., he had bestowed much thought on the king’s anagram. Thuillier, who was fond of making puns, declared that an anagram was nothing more than a pun on letters. The sight of Colleville, a man of real feeling, bound almost indissolubly to Thuillier, the model of an egoist, presented a difficult problem to the mind of an observer. The clerks in the offices explained it by saying, “Thuillier is rich, and the Colleville household costly.” This friendship, however, consolidated by time, was based on feelings and on facts which naturally explained it; an account of which may be found elsewhere (see “Les Petits Bourgeois”). We may remark in passing that though Madame Colleville was well known in the bureaus, the existence of Madame Thuillier was almost unknown there. Colleville, an active man, burdened with a family of children, was fat, round, and jolly, whereas Thuillier, “the beau of the Empire” without apparent anxieties and always at leisure, was slender and thin, with a livid face and a melancholy air. “We never know,” said Rabourdin, speaking of the two men, “whether our friendships are born of likeness or of contrast.”