rdin caught sight of him and thought, "What has
happened to him? can he be disgraced in any way?" The general-secretary
was, however, only thinking how the pretty Madame Colleville, whose
intentions were exactly those of Madame Rabourdin, had summarily
abandoned him when it suited her to do so. Rabourdin caught the sham
statesman's eyes fixed on his wife, and he recorded the look in his
memory. He was too keen an observer not to understand des Lupeaulx to
the bottom, and he deeply despised him; but, as with most busy men,
his feelings and sentiments seldom came to the surface. Absorption in a
beloved work is practically equivalent to the cleverest dissimulation,
and thus it was that the opinions and ideas of Rabourdin were a sealed
book to des Lupeaulx. The former was sorry to see the man in his house,
but he was never willing to oppose his wife's wishes. At this particular
moment, while he talked confidentially with a supernumerary of his
office who was destined, later, to play an unconscious part in a
political intrigue resulting from the death of La Billardiere, he
watched, though half-abstractedly, his wife and des Lupeaulx.

Here we must explain, as much for foreigners as for our own
grandchildren, what a supernumerary in a government office in Paris
means.

The supernumerary is to the administration what a choir-boy is to a
church, what the company's child is to the regiment, what the figurante
is to a theatre; something artless, naive, innocent, a being blinded by
illusions. Without illusions what would become of any of us? They give
strength to bear the res angusta domi of arts and the beginnings of all
science by inspiring us with faith. Illusion is illimitable faith. Now
the supernumerary has faith in the administration; he never thinks
it cold, cruel, and hard, as it really is. There are two kinds of
supernumeraries, or hangers-on,--one poor, the other rich. The poor one
is rich in hope and wants a place, the rich one is poor in spirit and
wants nothing. A wealthy family is not so foolish as to put its able
men into the administration. It confides an unfledged scion to some
head-clerk, or gives him in charge of a directory who initiates him into
what Bilboquet, that profound philosopher, called the high comedy of
government; he is spared all the horrors of drudgery and is finally
appointed to some important office. The rich supernumerary never alarms
the other clerks; they know he does not endanger their int