eight o’clock in the morning
The elder of these men , who was also the richest , waited upon the main body of the clerks . He was sixty years of age , with white hair cropped short like a brush ; stout , thickset , and apoplectic about the neck , with a vulgar pimpled face , gray eyes , and a mouth like a furnace door ; such was the profile portrait of Antoine , the oldest attendant in the ministry . He had brought his two nephews , Laurent and Gabriel , from Echelles in Savoie , -- one to serve the heads of the bureaus , the other the director himself . All three came to open the offices and clean them , between seven and eight o'clock in the morning ; at which time they read the newspapers and talked civil service politics from their point of view with the servants of other divisions , exchanging the bureaucratic gossip . In common with servants of modern houses who know their masters ' private affairs thoroughly , they lived at the ministry like spiders at the centre of a web , where they felt the slightest jar of the fabric . On a Thursday evening , the day after the ministerial reception and Madame Rabourdin 's evening party , just as Antoine was trimming his beard and his nephews were assisting him in the antechamber of the division on the upper floor , they were surprised by the unexpected arrival of one of the clerks . `` That 's Monsieur Dutocq , '' said Antoine .