Boniface was called “tall Cointet” to distinguish him from his brother, “fat Cointet,” and the nicknames expressed a difference in character as well as a physical difference between a pair of equally redoubtable personages. As for Jean Cointet, a jolly, stout fellow, with a face from a Flemish interior, colored by the southern sun of Angoulême, thick-set, short and paunchy as Sancho Panza; with a smile on his lips and a pair of sturdy shoulders, he was a striking contrast to his older brother. Nor was the difference only physical and intellectual. Jean might almost be called Liberal in politics; he belonged to the Left Centre, only went to mass on Sundays, and lived on a remarkably good understanding with the Liberal men of business. There were those in L’Houmeau who said that this divergence between the brothers was more apparent than real. Tall Cointet turned his brother’s seeming good nature to advantage very skilfully. Jean was his bludgeon. It was Jean who gave all the hard words; it was Jean who conducted the executions which little beseemed the elder brother’s benevolence. Jean took the storms department; he would fly into a rage, and propose terms that nobody would think of accepting, to pave the way for his brother’s less unreasonable propositions. And by such policy the pair attained their ends, sooner or later. Eve, with a woman’s tact, had soon divined the characters of the two brothers; she was on her guard with foes so formidable. David, informed beforehand of everything by his wife, lent a profoundly inattentive mind to his enemies’ proposals. “Come to an understanding with my wife,” he said, as he left the Cointets in the office and went back to his laboratory. “Mme. Séchard knows more about the business than I do myself. I am interested in something that will pay better than this poor place; I hope to find a way to retrieve the losses that I have made through you----” “And how?” asked the fat Cointet, chuckling. Eve gave her husband a look that meant, “Be careful!” “You will be my tributaries,” said David, “and all other consumers of papers besides.” “Then what are you investigating?” asked the hypocritical Boniface Cointet. Boniface’s question slipped out smoothly and insinuatingly, and again Eve’s eyes implored her husband to give an answer that was no answer, or to say nothing at all. “I am trying to produce paper at fifty per cent less than the present cost price,” and he went. He did not see the glances exchanged between the brothers. “That is an inventor, a man of his build cannot sit with his hands before him.--Let us exploit him,” said Boniface’s eyes. “How can we do it?” said Jean’s. Mme. Séchard spoke. “David treats me just in the same way,” she said. “If I show any curiosity, he feels suspicious of my name, no doubt, and out comes that remark of his; it is only a formula, after all.”