h more education than
his father, raises higher his ambitious gaze. Often the son of a retail
tradesman would fain be something in the State.

Ambition of that sort carries on our thought to the second Parisian
sphere. Go up one story, then, and descend to the _entresol_: or climb
down from the attic and remain on the fourth floor; in fine, penetrate
into the world which has possessions: the same result! Wholesale
merchants, and their men--people with small banking accounts and much
integrity--rogues and catspaws, clerks old and young, sheriffs' clerks,
barristers' clerks, solicitors' clerks; in fine, all the working,
thinking, and speculating members of that lower middle class which
honeycombs the interests of Paris and watches over its granary,
accumulates the coin, stores the products that the proletariat have
made, preserves the fruits of the South, the fishes, the wine from every
sun-favored hill; which stretches its hands over the Orient, and takes
from it the shawls that the Russ and the Turk despise; which harvests
even from the Indies; crouches down in expectation of a sale, greedy
of profit; which discounts bills, turns over and collects all kinds of
securities, holds all Paris in its hand, watches over the fantasies
of children, spies out the caprices and the vices of mature age,
sucks money out of disease. Even so, if they drink no brandy, like the
artisan, nor wallow in the mire of debauch, all equally abuse their
strength, immeasurably strain their bodies and their minds alike, are
burned away with desires, devastated with the swiftness of the pace. In
their case the physical distortion is accomplished beneath the whip of
interests, beneath the scourge of ambitions which torture the educated
portion of this monstrous city, just as in the case of the proletariat
it is brought about by the cruel see-saw of the material elaborations
perpetually required from the despotism of the aristocratic "_I will_."
Here, too, then, in order to obey that universal master, pleasure or
gold, they must devour time, hasten time, find more than four-and-twenty
hours in the day and night, waste themselves, slay themselves, and
purchase two years of unhealthy repose with thirty years of old age.
Only, the working-man dies in hospital when the last term of his stunted
growth expires; whereas the man of the middle class is set upon living,
and lives on, but in a state of idiocy. You will meet him, with his
worn, flat old face, wit