“You would not listen to me if I were,” he replied, with a melancholy air, in spite of the deep inward satisfaction her remarks gave him.  “What would such future promotions avail me, if you dismiss me now?”

“Before I listen to you,” she replied, with naive Parisian liveliness, “we must be able to understand each other.”

And she left the old fop to go and speak with Madame de Chessel, a countess from the provinces, who seemed about to take leave.

“That is a very extraordinary woman,” said des Lupeaulx to himself.  “I don’t know my own self when I am with her.”

Accordingly, this man of no principle, who six years earlier had kept a ballet-girl, and who now, thanks to his position, made himself a seraglio with the pretty wives of the under-clerks, and lived in the world of journalists and actresses, became devotedly attentive all the evening to Celestine, and was the last to leave the house.

“At last!” thought Madame Rabourdin, as she undressed that night, “we have the place!  Twelve thousand francs a year and perquisites, beside the rents of our farms at Grajeux,—­nearly twenty thousand francs a year.  It is not affluence, but at least it isn’t poverty.”

CHAPTER IV

Three-quarter length portraits of certain government officials

If it were possible for literature to use the microscope of the Leuwenhoeks, the Malpighis, and the Raspails (an attempt once made by Hoffman, of Berlin), and if we could magnify and then picture the teredos navalis, in other words, those ship-worms which brought Holland within an inch of collapsing by honey-combing her dykes, we might have been able to give a more distinct idea of Messieurs Gigonnet, Baudoyer, Saillard, Gaudron, Falleix, Transon, Godard and company, borers and burrowers, who proved their undermining power in the thirtieth year of this century.

But now it is time to show another set of teredos, who burrowed and swarmed in the government offices where the principal scenes of our present study took place.

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.  As to the important personage called, under the Empire, head of division, then, under the Restoration, director, and now by the former name, head or chief of division, he lives either above or below the offices of his three or four different bureaus.

Speaking in the administrative sense, a bureau consists of a man-servant, several supernumeraries (who do the work gratis for a certain number of years), various copying clerks, writers of bills and deeds, order clerks, principal clerks, second or under head-clerk, and head-clerk, otherwise called head or chief of the bureau.  These denominational titles vary under some administrations; for instance, the order-clerks are sometimes called auditors, or again, book-keepers.