erests, for he
seeks only the highest posts in the administration. About the period of
which we write many families were saying to themselves: "What can we do
with our sons?" The army no longer offered a chance for fortune. Special
careers, such as civil and military engineering, the navy, mining, and
the professorial chair were all fenced about by strict regulations or
to be obtained only by competition; whereas in the civil service
the revolving wheel which turned clerks into prefects, sub-prefects,
assessors, and collectors, like the figures in a magic lantern, was
subjected to no such rules and entailed no drudgery. Through this easy
gap emerged into life the rich supernumeraries who drove their tilburys,
dressed well, and wore moustachios, all of them as impudent as parvenus.
Journalists were apt to persecute the tribe, who were cousins, nephews,
brothers, or other relatives of some minister, some deputy, or an
influential peer. The humbler clerks regarded them as a means of
influence.

The poor supernumerary, on the other hand, who is the only real worker,
is almost always the son of some former clerk's widow, who lives on a
meagre pension and sacrifices herself to support her son until he can
get a place as copying-clerk, and then dies leaving him no nearer the
head of his department than writer of deeds, order-clerks, or, possibly,
under-head-clerk. Living always in some locality where rents are low,
this humble supernumerary starts early from home. For him the Eastern
question relates only to the morning skies. To go on foot and not get
muddied, to save his clothes, and allow for the time he may lose in
standing under shelter during a shower, are the preoccupations of
his mind. The street pavements, the flaggings of the quays and the
boulevards, when first laid down, were a boon to him. If, for some
extraordinary reason, you happen to be in the streets of Paris at
half-past seven or eight o'clock of a winter's morning, and see through
piercing cold or fog or rain a timid, pale young man loom up, cigarless,
take notice of his pockets. You will be sure to see the outline of
a roll which his mother has given him to stay his stomach between
breakfast and dinner. The guilelessness of the supernumerary does not
last long. A youth enlightened by gleams by Parisian life soon measures
the frightful distance that separates him from the head-clerkship, a
distance which no mathematician, neither Archimedes, nor Leibnitz, n