oped there, and there only. Under
a monarchy you will find none but courtiers and vassals, whereas under a
constitutional government you may be flattered, served, and adulated by
free men. In France ministers are better off than kings or women; they
have some one who thoroughly understands them. Perhaps, indeed, the
private secretary is to be pitied as much as women and white paper. They
are nonentities who are made to bear all things. They are allowed no
talents except hidden ones, which must be employed in the service of
their ministers. A public show of talent would ruin them. The
private secretary is therefore an intimate friend in the gift of
government--However, let us return to the bureaus.

Three men-servants lived in peace in the Billardiere division, to wit: a
footman for the two bureaus, another for the service of the two chiefs,
and a third for the director of the division himself. All three were
lodged, warmed, and clothed by the State, and wore the well-known livery
of the State, blue coat with red pipings for undress, and broad red,
white, and blue braid for great occasions. La Billardiere's man had the
air of a gentleman-usher, an innovation which gave an aspect of dignity
to the division.

Pillars of the ministry, experts in all manners and customs
bureaucratic, well-warmed and clothed at the State's expense, growing
rich by reason of their few wants, these lackeys saw completely through
the government officials, collectively and individually. They had
no better way of amusing their idle hours than by observing these
personages and studying their peculiarities. They knew how far to trust
the clerks with loans of money, doing their various commissions with
absolute discretion; they pawned and took out of pawn, bought up bills
when due, and lent money without interest, albeit no clerk ever borrowed
of them without returning a "gratification." These servants without a
master received a salary of nine hundred francs a year; new years' gifts
and "gratifications" brought their emoluments to twelve hundred francs,
and they made almost as much money by serving breakfasts to the clerks
at the office.

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 o