t
of this visionary who desired to live, to assert himself in putting an
end to so many abuses, and whom his colleagues, his chiefs of division,
his chief of service, the chief of the State himself cautiously advised:
"Make no innovations! Let things go! That has gone on so for so long!
What is the use of changing? It will still do very well!"

Ah! it was to throw off the shackles and to try the impossible! Vaudrey
found himself hemmed in between his dearest hopes and the most
disheartening realities. He was asked for offices, not reforms. The men
charged with the fate of the country were not straggling after progress,
they were looking after their own interests, their landed and
shopkeeping interests. He felt nauseated by all this. He held those
deputies in contempt who besieged his cabinet and filled his antechamber
in order to beg, claim and demand. All of them sought something, and
they were almost strangled by the solicitations of their own
constituents. They appeared to Sulpice to be rather the commissionaires
of universal suffrage than the servants. This abasement before the
manipulators of the votes made Vaudrey indignant. He felt that France
was becoming by degrees a vast market for favors, a nation in which
everyone asked office from those who to keep their own promised
everything, and the thought filled him with terror. The ministers,
wedded to their positions, became the mere servants of the deputies,
while the latter obeyed the orders of their constituents. All was kept
within a vast network of office-seeking and trafficking. And with it
all, a hatred of genuine talent, bitter selfishness and the crushing
narrowness of ideas!

Vaudrey recalled a story that had been told him, how during the Empire,
the Emperor, terrified, feeling himself isolated, asked and searched for
a man, and how a certain little bell in the Tuileries was especially
provided to warn the chamberlains of the entry into the chateau of a new
face, of the visit of a stranger, in order that the camarilla, warned by
the particular ring, would have time to place themselves on their guard,
and to send the newcomer to the right about if he might become an aid to
the master and a danger to the servants. Well! Sulpice did not hear that
invisible and secret bell, but he guessed its presence, he divined its
presence around him, warning the interested, always ready to chase away
the stranger; he felt that its secret thread was everywhere thrown
arou