g. In his department,
everybody asked for something or got someone else to ask. _Promotion_,
that insatiable hunger, was the greedy dream of all that little world of
intriguing, underhand, begging employes, who opened up around the new
minister so many approaches, like military lines around a redoubt.

Sulpice felt himself besieged and the target for a crowd of greedy
ambitions. The sub-heads of departments cast bitterly envious glances at
the offices of chiefs, like hungry beggars hypnotized by the display at
Chevet's. Commendatory letters rained on him. This shower of
begging-missives nauseated the minister to such an extent that he
endeavored to arrest the stream, ordering Warcolier, the Under Secretary
of State, to be called and requesting him to reply to the deputies, to
the senators, to everybody, in fact: that he had no influence to use,
that the era of favoritism was over; that he, Vaudrey, understood that
only merit would receive official gifts. "Merit only. You understand,
Monsieur Warcolier?"

Warcolier rolled his huge eyes in astonishment; then, with the
self-satisfied smile of an expressionless beau, after passing his fat
hand through his long whiskers, yellow and streaked with gray, that
decorated his rosy cheeks, he remarked doctorally, that Monsieur le
Ministre was entering on a path that, in all conscience, he could
qualify as being only dangerous. Eh! _bon Dieu!_ one must do something
for one's friends!--Vaudrey's accession to the Department of the
Interior had given birth to many new hopes; on all grounds they must be
satisfied. Vaudrey would never be forgiven for such deception.

"What deception?" asked Sulpice. "I promised reforms and I am going to
carry them out, but people laugh at my reforms and ask what?--Places."

"Bless me!" replied Warcolier, "entirely logical."

"Be it so! but there are places and places. I cannot, however, retire a
whole staff of employes to give place to a new one. That's precisely
what they want. There is not a deputy who has not one candidate to
recommend to me."

"That's very natural, Monsieur le Ministre, seeing that there is not a
deputy who may not himself be a candidate."

"Still, he should be independent of his electors, but in truth, it is
not the rights of those who have elected them that my colleagues defend,
it is their own interests."

"Every man for himself, Monsieur le Ministre. Yesterday, even yesterday,
one of my electors whose wife has just given