ther than by sentiment; and woe to him or to her who
ventured to hint that it, the charity, was misplaced. In those days
there was a prefect of police, M. Boitelle. He was a worthy man, endowed
with a great deal of common sense, and, above all, honest to a degree.
Belonging to the middle classes, he was free from the vulgar greed that
so often distinguishes them in France; and, after leaving the army as a
non-commissioned officer, had settled on a small farm left to him by his
parents. Now, it so happened that M. de Persigny, whose real name was
Fialin, had been a sergeant in the same regiment, and one day, after the
advent of the Empire, being in the north, went to pay his former comrade
a visit. I am perfectly certain that M. Boitelle, whom I knew, and with
whose son I have continued the amicable relations subsisting between his
father and myself, did not solicit any honours or appointment from the
then powerful friend of the Emperor; nevertheless, Persigny appointed
his fellow-messmate to the sub-prefectorship of St. Quentin. The
emoluments, even in those days, were not large, but M. Boitelle was only
a small farmer, and the promise of quick preferment may have induced
him to leave his peaceful homestead; in short, M. Boitelle accepted,
and, after several promotions, found himself at last at the Paris
Prefecture of Police. In this instance the choice was really a good one.
I have known a good many prefects of police, among others M. de Maupas,
who officiated on the night of the Coup d'Etat, and who was also a
personal friend; but I never knew one so thoroughly fitted for the
arduous post as M. Boitelle. Though not a man of vast reading or
brilliant education, he was essentially a man of the world in the best
sense of the word. He was not a martinet, but a capable disciplinarian,
and, what was better still, endowed with a feeling of great tolerance
for the foibles of modern society. The soldier and the philosopher were
so inextricably mixed up in him, that it would have been difficult to
say where the one ended and the other began. M. de Maupas was at times
too conscious of his own importance; there was too much of the French
official in him. His successful co-operation in the Coup d'Etat had
imbued him with an exaggerated notion of his own capabilities of "taking
people by the scruff of the neck and running them in" (a empoigner les
gens). An English friend of mine, to whom I introduced him, summed him
up, perhaps, mor