rror, and
agrarian law. The democratic element is the development of the lesser
bourgeoisie, the reign of Phellions.

The worthy old man is always dignified; dignity serves to explain his
life. He has brought up his children with dignity; he has kept himself
a father in their eyes; he insists on being honored in his home, just as
he himself honors power and his superiors. He has never made debts. As
a juryman his conscience obliges him to sweat blood and water in the
effort to follow the debates of a trial; he never laughs, not even if
the judge, and audience, and all the officials laugh. Eminently useful,
he gives his services, his time, everything--except his money. Felix
Phellion, his son, the professor, is his idol; he thinks him capable of
attaining to the Academy of Sciences. Thuillier, between the audacious
nullity of Minard, and the solid silliness of Phellion, was a neutral
substance, but connected with both through his dismal experience. He
managed to conceal the emptiness of his brain by commonplace talk, just
as he covered the yellow skin of his bald pate with thready locks of his
gray hair, brought from the back of his head with infinite art by the
comb of his hairdresser.

"In any other career," he was wont to say, speaking of the government
employ, "I should have made a very different fortune."

He had seen the _right_, which is possible in theory and impossible in
practice,--results proving contrary to premises,--and he related the
intrigues and the injustices of the Rabourdin affair.

"After that, one can believe all, and believe nothing," he would say.
"Ah! it is a queer thing, government! I'm very glad not to have a son,
and never to see him in the career of a place-hunter."

Colleville, ever gay, rotund, and good-humored, a sayer of "quodlibets,"
a maker of anagrams, always busy, represented the capable and bantering
bourgeois, with faculty without success, obstinate toil without result;
he was also the embodiment of jovial resignation, mind without object,
art with usefulness, for, excellent musician that he was, he never
played now except for his daughter.

The Thuillier salon was in some sort a provincial salon, lighted,
however, by continual flashes from the Parisian conflagration; its
mediocrity and its platitudes followed the current of the times. The
popular saying and thing (for in Paris the thing and its saying are
like the horse and its rider) ricochetted, so to speak, to this company