, gentlemen! no politics!"

Bixiou. "Fleury is right. Serving the State in these days is no longer
serving a prince who knew how to punish and reward. The State now is
/everybody/. Everybody of course cares for nobody. Serve everybody, and
you serve nobody. Nobody is interested in nobody; the government clerk
lives between two negations. The world has neither pity nor respect,
neither heart nor head; everybody forgets to-morrow the service of
yesterday. Now each one of you may be, like Monsieur Baudoyer, an
administrative genius, a Chateaubriand of reports, a Bossouet of
circulars, the Canalis of memorials, the gifted son of diplomatic
despatches; but I tell you there is a fatal law which interferes with
all administrative genius,--I mean the law of promotion by average. This
average is based on the statistics of promotion and the statistics
of mortality combined. It is very certain that on entering whichever
section of the Civil Service you please at the age of eighteen, you
can't get eighteen hundred francs a year till you reach the age of
thirty. Now there's no free and independent career in which, in
the course of twelve years, a young man who has gone through the
grammar-school, been vaccinated, is exempt from military service, and
possesses all his faculties (I don't mean transcendent ones) can't amass
a capital of forty-five thousand francs in centimes, which represents
a permanent income equal to our salaries, which are, after all,
precarious. In twelve years a grocer can earn enough to give him ten
thousand francs a year; a painter can daub a mile of canvas and be
decorated with the Legion of honor, or pose as a neglected genius. A
literary man becomes professor of something or other, or a journalist
at a hundred francs for a thousand lines; he writes 'feuilletons,' or
he gets into Saint-Pelagie for a brilliant article that offends the
Jesuits,--which of course is an immense benefit to him and makes him a
politician at once. Even a lazy man, who does nothing but make debts,
has time to marry a widow who pays them; a priest finds time to become a
bishop 'in partibus.' A sober, intelligent young fellow, who begins
with a small capital as a money-changer, soon buys a share in a broker's
business; and, to go even lower, a petty clerk becomes a notary, a
rag-picker lays by two or three thousand francs a year, and the poorest
workmen often become manufacturers; whereas, in the rotatory movement
of this present civili