nt to disparage those who outstrip them by an inch or
two, and the demigods to threaten institutions, the throne, or whatever
does not adore them unconditionally. So soon as a nation has, in a very
unstatesmanlike spirit, pulled down all recognized social superiorities,
she opens the sluice through which rushes a torrent of secondary
ambitions, the meanest of which resolves to lead. She had, so democrats
declare, an evil in her aristocracy; but a defined and circumscribed
evil; she exchanges it for a dozen armed and contending
aristocracies--the worst of all situations. By proclaiming the equality
of all, she has promulgated a declaration of the rights of Envy. We
inherit to-day the saturnalias of the Revolution transferred to the
domain, apparently peaceful, of the mind, of industry, of politics; it
now seems that reputations won by toil, by services rendered, by talent,
are privileges granted at the expense of the masses. Agrarian law will
spread to the field of glory. Never, in any age, have men demanded
the affixing of their names on the nation's posters for reasons
more puerile. Distinction is sought at any price, by ridicule, by an
affectation of interest in the cause of Poland, in penitentiaries, in
the future of liberated galley-slaves, in all the little scoundrels
above and below twelve years, and in every other social misery. These
diverse manias create fictitious dignities, presidents, vice-presidents,
and secretaries of societies, the number of which is greater than that
of the social questions they seek to solve. Society on its grand scale
has been demolished to make a million of little ones in the image of the
defunct. These parasitic organizations reveal decomposition; are they
not the swarming of maggots in the dead body? All these societies
are the daughters of one mother, Vanity. It is not thus that Catholic
charity or true beneficence proceeds; _they_ study evils in wounds and
cure them; they don't perorate in public meetings upon deadly ills for
the pleasure of perorating.

Fabien du Ronceret, without being a superior man, had divined, by the
exercise of that greedy common-sense peculiar to a Norman, the gain he
could derive from this public vice. Every epoch has its character which
clever men make use of. Fabien's mind, though not clever, was wholly
bent on making himself talked about.

"My dear fellow, a man must make himself talked about, if he wants to
be anything," he said, on parting from the