第44章 THE MACHINE IN MOTION(5)

Paulmier [delighted to annoy Chazelle]. "Why didn't you look about when you came into the room? You might have seen the elephant, and the hat too; they are big enough to be visible."Chazelle [dismally]. "Disgusting business! I don't see why we should be treated like slaves because the government gives us four francs and sixty-five centimes a day."Fleury [entering]. "Down with Baudoyer! hurrah for Rabourdin!--that's the cry in the division."Chazelle [getting more and more angry]. "Baudoyer can turn off me if he likes, I sha'n't care. In Paris there are a thousand ways of earning five francs a day; why, I could earn that at the Palais de Justice, copying briefs for the lawyers."Paulmier [still prodding him]. "It is very easy to say that; but a government place is a government place, and that plucky Colleville, who works like a galley-slave outside of this office, and who could earn, if he lost his appointment, more than his salary, prefers to keep his place. Who the devil is fool enough to give up his expectations?"Chazelle [continuing his philippic]. "You may not be, but I am! We have no chances at all. Time was when nothing was more encouraging than a civil-service career. So many men were in the army that there were not enough for the government work; the maimed and the halt and the sick ones, like Paulmier, and the near-sighted ones, all had their chance of a rapid promotion. But now, ever since the Chamber invented what they called special training, and the rules and regulations for civil-service examiners, we are worse off than common soldiers. The poorest places are at the mercy of a thousand mischances because we are now ruled by a thousand sovereigns."Bixiou [returning]. "Are you crazy, Chazelle? Where do you find a thousand sovereigns?--not in your pocket, are they?"Chazelle. "Count them up. There are four hundred over there at the end of the pont de la Concorde (so called because it leads to the scene of perpetual discord between the Right and Left of the Chamber); three hundred more at the end of the rue de Tournon. The court, which ought to count for the other three hundred, has seven hundred parts less power to get a man appointed to a place under government than the Emperor Napoleon had."Fleury. "All of which signifies that in a country where there are three powers you may bet a thousand to one that a government clerk who has no influence but his own merits to advance him will remain in obscurity."Bixiou [looking alternately at Chazelle and Fleury]. "My sons, you have yet to learn that in these days the worst state of life is the state of belonging to the State."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. 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. Aliterary 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 civilization, which mistakes perpetual division and redivision for progress, an unhappy civil service clerk, like Chazelle for instance, is forced to dine for twenty-two sous a meal, struggles with his tailor and bootmaker, gets into debt, and is an absolute nothing; worse than that, he becomes an idiot! Come, gentlemen, now's the time to make a stand! Let us all give in our resignations! Fleury, Chazelle, fling yourselves into other employments and become the great men you really are."Chazelle [calmed down by Bixiou's allocution]. "No, I thank you"[general laughter].