r a
baby's bottle, or a fire engine, or chimneys that consume no fuel, or
ovens which cook cutlets with three sheets of paper?"

Minard [departing.] "Adieu, I shall keep my secret."

Bixiou. "Well, young Poiret junior, you see,--all these gentlemen
understand me."

Poiret [crest-fallen]. "Monsieur Bixiou, would you do me the honor
to come down for once to my level and speak in a language I can
understand?"

Bixiou [winking at the rest]. "Willingly." [Takes Poiret by the button
of his frock-coat.] "Before you leave this office forever perhaps you
would be glad to know what you are--"

Poiret [quickly]. "An honest man, monsieur."

Bixiou [shrugging his shoulders]. "--to be able to define, explain, and
analyze precisely what a government clerk is? Do you know what he is?"

Poiret. "I think I do."

Bixiou [twisting the button]. "I doubt it."

Poiret. "He is a man paid by government to do work."

Bixiou. "Oh! then a soldier is a government clerk?"

Poiret [puzzled]. "Why, no."

Bixiou. "But he is paid by the government to do work, to mount guard and
show off at reviews. You may perhaps tell me that he longs to get out of
his place,--that he works too hard and fingers too little metal, except
that of his musket."

Poiret [his eyes wide open]. "Monsieur, a government clerk is, logically
speaking, a man who needs the salary to maintain himself, and is not
free to get out of his place; for he doesn't know how to do anything but
copy papers."

Bixiou. "Ah! now we are coming to a conclusion. So the bureau is the
clerk's shell, husk, pod. No clerk without a bureau, no bureau without
a clerk. But what do you make, then, of a customs officer?" [Poiret
shuffles his feet and tries to edge away; Bixiou twists off one button
and catches him by another.] "He is, from the bureaucratic point of
view, a neutral being. The excise-man is only half a clerk; he is on the
confines between civil and military service; neither altogether soldier
nor altogether clerk--Here, here, where are you going?" [Twists the
button.] "Where does the government clerk proper end? That's a serious
question. Is a prefect a clerk?"

Poiret [hesitating]. "He is a functionary."

Bixiou. "But you don't mean that a functionary is not a clerk? that's an
absurdity."

Poiret [weary and looking round for escape]. "I think Monsieur Godard
wants to say something."

Godard. "The clerk is the order, the functionary the species."

Bixiou [laughing]. "I s