Honoré de Balzac

“ Never had Rabourdin seemed so anxious and preoccupied as he now did in the mornings as he walked from his house to the ministry, or at half-past four in the afternoon, when he returned. Madame Rabourdin, on her part, disconsolate over her wasted life, weary of secretly working to obtain a few luxuries of dress, never appeared so bitterly discontented as now; but, like any wife who is really attached to her husband, she considered it unworthy of a superior woman to condescend to the shameful devices by which the wives of some officials eke out the insufficiency of their husband's salary. ”

“ Illusion is illimitable faith. Now the supernumerary has faith in the administration; he never thinks it cold, cruel, and hard, as it really is. There are two kinds of supernumeraries, or hangers-on,—one poor, the other rich. The poor one is rich in hope and wants a place, the rich one is poor in spirit and wants nothing. A wealthy family is not so foolish as to put its able men into the administration. It confides an unfledged scion to some head-clerk, or gives him in charge of a directory who initiates him into what Bilboquet, that profound philosopher, called the high comedy of government ”

“ At this instant Mitral showed his yellow face, surmounted by a wig which looked as though it might be made of hay, and made a sign to his niece to come at once, and not keep a carriage waiting at two francs an hour. Madame Baudoyer rose and went away without giving any explanation to her husband or father.
"Heaven has given you in that woman," said Monsieur Gaudron to Baudoyer when Elisabeth had disappeared, "a perfect treasure of prudence and virtue, a model of wisdom, a Christian who gives sure signs of possessing the Divine spirit. Religion alone is able to form such perfect characters. ”

“ In the minds of Madame de la Roche and her son, Rabourdin was at once a great man, a tyrant, and an angel. On him all the poor fellow's hopes of getting an appointment depended, and the lad's devotion to his chief was boundless. He dined once a fortnight in the rue Duphot; but always at a family dinner, invited by Rabourdin himself; Madame asked him to evening parties only when she wanted partners.
At that moment Rabourdin was scolding poor Sebastien, the only human being who was in the secret of his immense labors. ”

“ Fleury. "Because it has a constitutional government."
Colleville. "Gentlemen, 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. ”

“ After the rough and tumble of their first struggles in political life these men, less old than aged, have to endure the additional wear and tear of a ministry. Thus it is that their eyes begin to weaken just as they need to have the clear-sightedness of eagles; their mind is weary when its youth and fire need to be redoubled. The minister in whom Rabourdin sought to confide was in the habit of listening to men of undoubted superiority as they explained ingenious theories of government, applicable or inapplicable to the affairs of France. ”

“ So, in her paroxysms of thwarted ambition, in the moments when her wounded vanity gave her terrible shooting pains, Celestine turned upon Xavier Rabourdin. Was it not her husband's duty to give her a suitable position in the world? If she were a man she would have had the energy to make a rapid fortune for the sake of rendering an adored wife happy! She reproached him for being too honest a man. ”

“ No one comes or stays in the government offices but idlers, incapables, or fools. Thus the mediocrity of French administration has slowly come about. Bureaucracy, made up entirely of petty minds, stands as an obstacle to the prosperity of the nation; delays for seven years, by its machinery, the project of a canal which would have stimulated the production of a province; is afraid of everything, prolongs procrastination, and perpetuates the abuses which in turn perpetuate and consolidate itself. Bureaucracy holds all things and the administration itself in leading strings ”

“ At last, thanks to her boldness, Madame Rabourdin heard the hour strike when she was to have twenty thousand francs a year instead of eight thousand.
"And I shall have managed well," she said to herself. "I have had to make a little outlay; but these are times when hidden merit is overlooked, whereas if a man keeps himself well in sight before the world, cultivates social relations and extends them, he succeeds. After all, ministers and their friends interest themselves only in the people they see; but Rabourdin knows nothing of the world! ”

“ He begins to perceive the impossibilities of his career; he hears talk of favoritism; he discovers the intrigues of officials: he sees the questionable means by which his superiors have pushed their way,—one has married a young woman who made a false step; another, the natural daughter of a minister; this one shouldered the responsibility of another's fault; that one, full of talent, risks his health in doing, with the perseverance of a mole, prodigies of work which the man of influence feels incapable of doing for himself, though he takes the credit. ”

“ The poorest of all treasuries is the one with a surplus that it never uses; the mission of a minister of finance is to fling gold out of the windows. It will come back to him through the cellars; and you, you want to hoard it! The thing to do is to increase the offices and all government employments, instead of reducing them! So far from lessening the public debt, you ought to increase the creditors. If the Bourbons want to reign in peace, let them seek creditors in the towns and villages, and place their loans there; above all, they ought not to let foreigners draw interest away from France ”

“ Monsieur Gaudron, that sentence is worth more than the monstrance; I don't regret the four thousand eight hundred— Besides, Baudoyer, my lad, you'll pay them, won't you? Have you written it all down?"
"I shall make you repeat it, father, morning and evening," said Madame Saillard. "Yes, that's a good speech. How lucky you are, Monsieur Gaudron, to know so much. That's what it is to be brought up in a seminary; they learn there how to speak to God and his saints."
"He is as good as he is learned," said Baudoyer, pressing the priest's hand. ”

“ Most women grow weary of this daily struggle; they complain but they usually end by giving up to fate and taking what comes to them; Celestine's ambition, far from lessening, only increased through difficulties, and led her, when she found she could not conquer them, to sweep them aside. To her mind this complicated tangle of the affairs of life was a Gordian knot impossible to untie and which genius ought to cut. ”

“ He entered the salon and looked around him. "There are not two women in Paris who understand making life pleasant as she does. To keep such a home as this on twelve thousand francs a year!" he thought, looking at the flower-stands bright with bloom, and thinking of the social enjoyments that were about to gratify his vanity. "She was made to be the wife of a minister. When I think of his Excellency's wife, and how little she helps him! the good woman is a comfortable middle-class dowdy, and when she goes to the palace or into society—" He pinched his lips together. ”

“ Whereas if capital and interest are held only in France, neither France nor credit can perish. That's what saved England. Your plan is the tradesman's plan. An ambitious public man should produce some bold scheme,—he should make himself another Law, without Law's fatal ill-luck; he ought to exhibit the power of credit, and show that we should reduce, not principal, but interest, as they do in England."
"Come, come, Celestine," said Rabourdin; "mix up ideas as much as you please, and make fun of them,—I'm accustomed to that; but don't criticise a work of which you know nothing as yet." ”

“ Here we must explain, as much for foreigners as for our own grandchildren, what a supernumerary in a government office in Paris means.
The supernumerary is to the administration what a choir-boy is to a church, what the company's child is to the regiment, what the figurante is to a theatre; something artless, naive, innocent, a being blinded by illusions. Without illusions what would become of any of us? They give strength to bear the res angusta domi of arts and the beginnings of all science by inspiring us with faith. ”

“ After pointing out the means of making a tax-list on personal property which should be more impartial than the existing list, Rabourdin assessed the sums to be brought into the treasury by indirect taxation as so much per cent on each individual share. A tax is a levy of money on things or persons under disguises that are more or less specious. These disguises, excellent when the object is to extort money, become ridiculous in the present day, when the class on which the taxes weigh the heaviest knows why the State imposes them and by what machinery they are given back. ”

“ He led Madame Rabourdin into the boudoir, placed her on a sofa, and sat down beside her. "You are very sly," he said, "and I like you the better for it. Between ourselves, you are a clever woman. Des Lupeaulx served to bring you into this house, and that is all you wanted of him, isn't it? Now when a woman decides to love a man for what she can get out of him it is better to take a sexagenarian Excellency than a quadragenarian secretary; there's more profit and less annoyance. I'm a man with spectacles, grizzled hair, worn out with dissipation,—a fine lover, truly! ”

“ Spare a much-tried man. I cannot get an audience of the minister, and my honor is at stake."
"Good heavens, no! Dutocq can have the promise of a good place as soon as you are named head of the division."
"Ah! I see what you are about, dear child," said Rabourdin; "but the game you are playing is just as dishonorable as the real thing that is going on around us. A lie is a lie, and an honest woman—"
"Let me use the weapons employed against us."
"Celestine, the more that man des Lupeaulx feels he is foolishly caught in a trap, the more bitter he will be against me." ”

“ In Paris nearly all these government bureaus resemble each other. Into whatever ministry you penetrate to ask some slight favor, or to get redress for a trifling wrong, you will find the same dark corridors, ill-lighted stairways, doors with oval panes of glass like eyes, as at the theatre. In the first room as you enter you will find the office servant; in the second, the under-clerks; the private office of the second head-clerk is to the right or left, and further on is that of the head of the bureau. ”

“ France reigns through clothes over the whole of Europe; and every one must feel the importance of retaining a commercial sceptre that makes fashion in France what the navy is to England. This patriotic ardor which leads a nation to sacrifice everything to appearances—to the "paroistre," as d'Aubigne said in the days of Henri IV.—is the cause of those vast secret labors which employ the whole of a Parisian woman's morning, when she wishes, as Madame Rabourdin wished, to keep up on twelve thousand francs a year the style that many a family with thirty thousand does not indulge in. ”

“ I know you better than you know yourself. Rabourdin is a man who could be of immense service to you in such a career; he could do the steady work while you were in the Chamber. Just as you dream of the ministry, so I dream of seeing Rabourdin in the Council of State, and general director. It is therefore my object to draw together two men who can never injure, but, on the contrary, must greatly help each other. Isn't that a woman's mission? If you are friends, you will both rise the faster, and it is surely high time that each of you made hay. ”

“ Everything is known in a government office. The incapable man has a wife with a clear head, who has pushed him along and got him nominated for deputy; if he has not talent enough for an office, he cabals in the Chamber. The wife of another has a statesman at her feet. A third is the hidden informant of a powerful journalist. Often the disgusted and hopeless supernumerary sends in his resignation. ”

“ At this period he was forty years old, with gray hair of so pleasing a shade that women might at a pinch fall in love with it for it softened a somewhat melancholy countenance, blue eyes full of fire, a skin that was still fair, though rather ruddy and touched here and there with strong red marks; a forehead and nose a la Louis XV., a serious mouth, a tall figure, thin, or perhaps wasted, like that of a man just recovering from illness, and finally, a bearing that was midway between the indolence of a mere idler and the thoughtfulness of a busy man. ”

“ No matter what foolish declarations people make about money, they one and all, if they live in Paris, must grovel before accounts, do homage to figures, and kiss the forked hoof of the golden calf. What a problem was hers! twelve thousand francs a year to defray the costs of a household consisting of father, mother, two children, a chambermaid and cook, living on the second floor of a house in the rue Duphot, in an apartment costing two thousand francs a year. ”

“ Elisabeth Baudoyer, nee Saillard, is one of those persons who escape portraiture through their utter commonness; yet who ought to be sketched, because they are specimens of that second-rate Parisian bourgeoisie which occupies a place above the well-to-do artisan and below the upper middle classes,—a tribe whose virtues are well-nigh vices, whose defects are never kindly, but whose habits and manners, dull and insipid though they be, are not without a certain originality. Something pinched and puny about Elisabeth Saillard was painful to the eye. ”

“ The servants always received three francs on these occasions to buy themselves wine or coffee.
This little circle looked upon Saillard and Baudoyer as transcendent beings; they were government officers; they had risen by their own merits; they worked, it was said, with the minister himself; they owed their fortune to their talents; they were politicians. Baudoyer was considered the more able of the two; his position as head of a bureau presupposed labor that was more intricate and arduous than that of a cashier. ”

“ To worship the fool who succeeds, and not to grieve over the fall of an able man is the result of our melancholy education, of our manners and customs which drive men of intellect into disgust, and genius to despair.
What a difficult undertaking is the rehabilitation of the Civil Service while the liberal cries aloud in his newspapers that the salaries of clerks are a standing theft, calls the items of the budget a cluster of leeches, and every year demands why the nation should be saddled with a thousand millions of taxes. ”

“ She left him without finishing her sentence.
"Dear creature!" thought des Lupeaulx, as he saw her approach the minister, "des Lupeaulx has no longer the slightest remorse in turning against you. To-morrow evening when you offer me a cup of tea, you will be offering me a thing I no longer care for. All is over. Ah! when a man is forty years of age women may take pains to catch him, but they won't love him." ”

“ Repressed by religious devotion, her natural intelligence exercised itself within the limits marked out by cases of conscience, which form a mine of subtleties among which self-interest selects its subterfuges. Like those saintly personages in whom religion does not stifle ambition, Elisabeth was capable of requiring others to do a blamable action that she might reap the fruits ”

“ Instead of looking directly to the chief magistrate of this nation, the clerks have become, in spite of our fine patriotic ideas, the subsidiaries of the government; their superiors are blown about by the winds of a power called "the administration," and do not know from day to day where they may be on the morrow. As the routine of public business must go on, a certain number of indispensable clerks are kept in their places, though they hold these places on sufferance, anxious as they are to retain them. Bureaucracy, a gigantic power set in motion by dwarfs, was generated in this way. ”