are always met with in representative government, he
had accepted the position of scapegoat, receiving, privately, a round
sum of money and the opportunity to buy his present post of clerk in the
arrondissement. This man, not very honorable, and known to be a spy in
the government offices, was never welcomed as he thought he ought to be
by the Thuilliers; but the coldness of his landlords only made him the
more persistent in going to see them. He was a bachelor and had various
vices; he therefore concealed his life carefully, knowing well how to
maintain his position by flattering his superiors. The justice of peace
was much attached to Dutocq. This man, base as he was, managed, in the
end, to make himself tolerated by the Thuilliers, chiefly by coarse and
cringing adulation. He knew the facts of Thuillier's whole life, his
relations with Colleville, and, above all, with Madame Colleville. One
and all they feared his tongue, and the Thuilliers, without admitting
him to any intimacy, endured his visits.

The family which became the flower of the Thuillier salon was that of
a former ministerial clerk, once an object of pity in the government
offices, who, driven by poverty, left the public service, in 1827, to
fling himself into a business enterprise, having, as he thought, an
idea. Minard (that was his name) foresaw a fortune in one of those
wicked conceptions which reflect such discredit on French commerce,
but which, in the year 1827, had not yet been exposed and blasted by
publicity. Minard bought tea and mixed it with tea-leaves already used;
also he adulterated the elements of chocolate in a manner which enabled
him to sell the chocolate itself very cheaply. This trade in colonial
products, begun in the quartier Saint-Marcel, made a merchant of Minard.
He started a factory, and through these early connections he was able to
reach the sources of raw material. He then did honorably, and on a large
scale, a business begun in the first instance dishonorably. He became a
distiller, worked upon untold quantities of products, and, by the year
1835, was considered the richest merchant in the region of the Place
Maubert. By that time he had bought a handsome house in the rue des
Macons-Sorbonne; he had been assistant mayor, and in 1839 became mayor
of his arrondissement and judge in the Court of Commerce. He kept a
carriage, had a country-place near Lagny; his wife wore diamonds at the
court balls, and he prided himself on th