nistry to which Rabourdin belonged there flourished, as
general-secretary, a certain Monsieur Clement Chardin des Lupeaulx, one
of those men whom the tide of political events sends to the surface for
a few years, then engulfs on a stormy night, but whom we find again on a
distant shore, tossed up like the carcass of a wrecked ship which still
seems to have life in her. We ask ourselves if that derelict could ever
have held goodly merchandise or served a high emprise, co-operated
in some defence, held up the trappings of a throne, or borne away the
corpse of a monarchy. At this particular time Clement des Lupeaulx (the
"Lupeaulx" absorbed the "Chardin") had reached his culminating period.
In the most illustrious lives as in the most obscure, in animals as in
secretary-generals, there is a zenith and there is a nadir, a period
when the fur is magnificent, the fortune dazzling. In the nomenclature
which we derive from fabulists, des Lupeaulx belonged to the species
Bertrand, and was always in search of Ratons. As he is one of the
principal actors in this drama he deserves a description, all the
more precise because the revolution of July has suppressed his office,
eminently useful as it was, to a constitutional ministry.

Moralists usually employ their weapons against obstructive
administrations. In their eyes, crime belongs to the assizes or the
police-courts; but the socially refined evils escape their ken; the
adroitness that triumphs under shield of the Code is above them or
beneath them; they have neither eye-glass nor telescope; they want good
stout horrors easily visible. With their eyes fixed on the carnivora,
they pay no attention to the reptiles; happily, they abandon to the
writers of comedy the shading and colorings of a Chardin des Lupeaulx.
Vain and egotistical, supple and proud, libertine and gourmand, grasping
from the pressure of debt, discreet as a tomb out of which nought
issues to contradict the epitaph intended for the passer's eye, bold and
fearless when soliciting, good-natured and witty in all acceptations
of the word, a timely jester, full of tact, knowing how to compromise
others by a glance or a nudge, shrinking from no mudhole, but gracefully
leaping it, intrepid Voltairean, yet punctual at mass if a fashionable
company could be met in Saint Thomas Aquinas,--such a man as this
secretary-general resembled, in one way or another, all the mediocrities
who form the kernel of the political world. Know