the antechamber of
Paradise. They tell me that you who write the newspapers can make, as
they say, 'fine weather and foul'; that is, you have things all your own
way, and it's enough to ask your help to get any place, no matter what,
under government. Now, though I have faculties, like others, I know
myself: I have no education; I don't know how to write, and that's a
misfortune, for I have ideas. I am not seeking, therefore, to be your
rival; I judge myself, and I know I couldn't succeed there. But, as you
are so powerful, and as we are almost brothers, having played together
in childhood, I count upon you to launch me in a career and to protect
me--Oh, you _must_; I want a place, a place suitable to my capacity, to
such as I am, a place were I can make my fortune.' Massol was just about
to put his compatriot neck and crop out of the door with some brutal
speech, when the rustic ended his appeal thus: 'I don't ask to enter the
administration where people advance like tortoises--there's your cousin,
who has stuck in one post for twenty years. No, I only want to make
my debut.'--'On the stage?' asked Massol only too happy at that
conclusion.--'No, though I have gesture enough, and figure, and memory.
But there's too much wear and tear; I prefer the career of _porter_.'
Massol kept his countenance, and replied: 'I think there's more wear and
tear in that, but as your choice is made I'll see what I can do'; and he
got him, as Ravenouillet says, his first 'cordon.'"

"I was the first master," said Leon, "to consider the race of
porter. You'll find knaves of morality, mountebanks of vanity, modern
sycophants, septembriseurs, disguised in philanthropy, inventors of
palpitating questions, preaching the emancipation of the negroes,
improvement of little thieves, benevolence to liberated convicts, and
who, nevertheless, leave their porters in a condition worse than that
of the Irish, in holes more dreadful than a mud cabin, and pay them less
money to live on than the State pays to support a convict. I have done
but one good action in my life, and that was to build my porter a decent
lodge."

"Yes," said Bixiou, "if a man, having built a great cage divided into
thousands of compartments like the cells of a beehive or the dens of
a menagerie, constructed to receive human beings of all trades and all
kinds, if that animal, calling itself the proprietor, should go to a man
of science and say: 'I want an individual of the bimanous