CHAPTER I

THE RABOURDIN HOUSEHOLD

In Paris, where men of thought and study bear a certain likeness to

one another, living as they do in a common centre, you must have met

with several resembling Monsieur Rabourdin, whose acquaintance we are

about to make at a moment when he is head of a bureau in one of our

most important ministries. At this period he was forty years old, with

gray hair of so pleasing a shade that women might at a pinch fall in

love with it for it softened a somewhat melancholy countenance, blue

eyes full of fire, a skin that was still fair, though rather ruddy and

touched here and there with strong red marks; a forehead and nose a la

Louis XV., a serious mouth, a tall figure, thin, or perhaps wasted,

like that of a man just recovering from illness, and finally, a

bearing that was midway between the indolence of a mere idler and the

thoughtfulness of a busy man. If this portrait serves to depict his

character, a sketch of this man's dress will bring it still further

into relief. Rabourdin wore habitually a blue surcoat, a white cravat,

a waistcoat crossed a la Robespierre, black trousers without straps,

gray silk stockings and low shoes. Well-shaved, and with his stomach

warmed by a cup of coffee, he left home at eight in the morning with

the regularity of clock-work, always passing along the same streets on

his way to the ministry: so neat was he, so formal, so starched that

he might have been taken for an Englishman on the road to his embassy.

From these general signs you will readily discern a family man,

harassed by vexations in his own household, worried by annoyances at

the ministry, yet philosopher enough to take life as he found it; an

honest man, loving his country and serving it, not concealing from

himself the obstacles in the way of those who seek to do right;

prudent, because he knew men; exquisitely courteous with women, of

whom he asked nothing,--a man full of acquirements, affable with his

inferiors, holding his equals at great distance, and dignified towards

his superiors. At the epoch of which we write, you would have noticed

in him the coldly resigned air of one who has buried the illusions of

his youth and renounced every secret ambition; you would have

recognized a discouraged, but not disgusted man, one who still clings

to his first projects,--more perhaps to employ his faculties than in

the hope of a doubtful success. He was not decorated with any order,

and always accused himself of weakness for having worn that of the

Fleur-de-lis in the early days of the Restoration.

The life of this man was marked by certain mysterious peculiarities.

He had never known his father; his mother, a woman to whom luxury was

everything, always elegantly dressed, always on pleasure bent, whose

beauty seemed to him miraculous and whom he very seldom saw, left him

little at her death; but she had given him that too common and

incomplete education which produces so much ambition and so little

ability. A few days before his mother's death, when he was just

sixteen, he left the Lycee Napoleon to enter as supernumerary a

government office, where an unknown protector had provided him with a

place. At twenty-two years of age Rabourdin became under-head-clerk;

at twenty-five, head-clerk, or, as it was termed, head of the bureau.

From that day the hand that assisted the young man to start in life

was never felt again in his career, except as to a single

circumstance; it led him, poor and friendless, to the house of a

Monsieur Leprince, formerly an auctioneer, a widower said to be

extremely rich, and father of an only daughter. Xavier Rabourdin fell

desperately in love with Mademoiselle Celestine Leprince, then

seventeen years of age, who had all the matrimonial claims of a dowry

of two hundred thousand francs. Carefully educated by an artistic

mother, who transmitted her own talents to her daughter, this young

lady was fitted to attract distinguished men. Tall, handsome, and

finely-formed, she was a good musician, drew and painted, spoke

several languages, and even knew something of science,--a dangerous

advantage, which requires a woman to avoid carefully all appearance of

pedantry. Blinded by mistaken tenderness, the mother gave the daughter

false ideas as to her probable future; to the maternal eyes a duke or

an ambassador, a marshal of France or a minister of State, could alone

give her Celestine her due place in society. The young lady had,

moreover, the manners, language, and habits of the great world. Her

dress was richer and more elegant than was suitable for an unmarried

girl; a husband could give her nothing more than she now had, except

happiness. Besides all such indulgences, the foolish spoiling of the

mother, who died a year after the girl's marriage, made a husband's

task all the more difficult. What coolness and composure of mind were

needed to rule such a woman! Commonplace suitors held back in fear.

Xavier Rabourdin, without parents and without fortune other than his

situation under government, was proposed to Celestine by her father.

She resisted for a long time; not that she had any personal objection

to her suitor, who was young, handsome, and much in love, but she

shrank from the plain name of Madame Rabourdin. Monsieur Leprince

assured his daughter that Xavier was of the stock that statesmen came

of. Celestine answered that a man named Rabourdin would never be

anything under the government of the Bourbons, etc. Forced back to his

intrenchments, the father made the serious mistake of telling his

daughter that her future husband was certain of becoming Rabourdin "de

something or other" before he reached the age of admission to the

Chamber. Xavier was soon to be appointed Master of petitions, and

general-secretary at his ministry. From these lower steps of the

ladder the young man would certainly rise to the higher ranks of the

administration, possessed of a fortune and a name bequeathed to him in

a certain will of which he, Monsieur Leprince, was cognizant. On this

the marriage took place.

Rabourdin and his wife believed in the mysterious protector to whom

the auctioneer alluded. Led away by such hopes and by the natural

extravagance of happy love, Monsieur and Madame Rabourdin spent nearly

one hundred thousand francs of their capital in the first five years

of married life. By the end of this time Celestine, alarmed at the

non-advancement of her husband, insisted on investing the remaining

hundred thousand francs of her dowry in landed property, which

returned only a slender income; but her future inheritance from her

father would amply repay all present privations with perfect comfort

and ease of life. When the worthy auctioneer saw his son-in-law

disappointed of the hopes they had placed on the nameless protector,

he tried, for the sake of his daughter, to repair the secret loss by

risking part of his fortune in a speculation which had favourable

chances of success. But the poor man became involved in one of the

liquidations of the house of Nucingen, and died of grief, leaving

nothing behind him but a dozen fine pictures which adorned his

daughter's salon, and a few old-fashioned pieces of furniture, which

she put in the garret.

Eight years of fruitless expectation made Madame Rabourdin at last

understand that the paternal protector of her husband must have died,

and that his will, if it ever existed, was lost or destroyed. Two

years before her father's death the place of chief of division, which

became vacant, was given, over her husband's head, to a certain

Monsieur de la Billardiere, related to a deputy of the Right who was

made minister in 1823. It was enough to drive Rabourdin out of the

service; but how could he give up his salary of eight thousand francs

and perquisites, when they constituted three fourths of his income and

his household was accustomed to spend them? Besides, if he had

patience for a few more years he would then be entitled to a pension.

What a fall was this for a woman whose high expectations at the

opening of her life were more or less warranted, and one who was

admitted on all sides to be a superior woman.

Madame Rabourdin had justified the expectations formed of Mademoiselle

Leprince; she possessed the elements of that apparent superiority

which pleases the world; her liberal education enabled her to speak to

every one in his or her own language; her talents were real; she

showed an independent and elevated mind; her conversation charmed as

much by its variety and ease as by the oddness and originality of her

ideas. Such qualities, useful and appropriate in a sovereign or an

ambassadress, were of little service to a household compelled to jog

in the common round. Those who have the gift of speaking well desire

an audience; they like to talk, even if they sometimes weary others.

To satisfy the requirements of her mind Madame Rabourdin took a weekly

reception-day and went a great deal into society to obtain the

consideration her self-love was accustomed to enjoy. Those who know

Parisian life will readily understand how a woman of her temperament

suffered, and was martyrized at heart by the scantiness of her

pecuniary means. No matter what foolish declarations people make about

money, they one and all, if they live in Paris, must grovel before

accounts, do homage to figures, and kiss the forked hoof of the golden

calf. What a problem was hers! twelve thousand francs a year to defray

the costs of a household consisting of father, mother, two children, a

chambermaid and cook, living on the second floor of a house in the rue

Duphot, in an apartment costing two thousand francs a year. Deduct the

dress and the carriage of Madame before you estimate the gross

expenses of the family, for dress precedes everything; then see what

remains for the education of the children (a girl of eight and a boy

of nine, whose maintenance must cost at least two thousand francs

besides) and you will find that Madame Rabourdin could barely afford

to give her husband thirty francs a month. That is the position of

half the husbands in Paris, under penalty of being thought monsters.

Thus it was that this woman who believed herself destined to shine in

the world was condemned to use her mind and her faculties in a sordid

struggle, fighting hand to hand with an account-book. Already,

terrible sacrifice of pride! she had dismissed her man-servant, not

long after the death of her father. Most women grow weary of this

daily struggle; they complain but they usually end by giving up to

fate and taking what comes to them; Celestine's ambition, far from

lessening, only increased through difficulties, and led her, when she

found she could not conquer them, to sweep them aside. To her mind

this complicated tangle of the affairs of life was a Gordian knot

impossible to untie and which genius ought to cut. Far from accepting

the pettiness of middle-class existence, she was angry at the delay

which kept the great things of life from her grasp,--blaming fate as

deceptive. Celestine sincerely believed herself a superior woman.

Perhaps she was right; perhaps she would have been great under great

circumstances; perhaps she was not in her right place. Let us remember

there are as many varieties of woman as there are of man, all of which

society fashions to meet its needs. Now in the social order, as in

Nature's order, there are more young shoots than there are trees, more

spawn than full-grown fish, and many great capacities (Athanase

Granson, for instance) which die withered for want of moisture, like

seeds on stony ground. There are, unquestionably, household women,

accomplished women, ornamental women, women who are exclusively wives,

or mothers, or sweethearts, women purely spiritual or purely material;

just as there are soldiers, artists, artisans, mathematicians, poets,

merchants, men who understand money, or agriculture, or government,

and nothing else. Besides all this, the eccentricity of events leads

to endless cross-purposes; many are called and few are chosen is the

law of earth as of heaven. Madame Rabourdin conceived herself fully

capable of directing a statesman, inspiring an artist, helping an

inventor and pushing his interests, or of devoting her powers to the

financial politics of a Nucingen, and playing a brilliant part in the

great world. Perhaps she was only endeavouring to excuse to her own

mind a hatred for the laundry lists and the duty of overlooking the

housekeeping bills, together with the petty economies and cares of a

small establishment. She was superior only in those things where it

gave her pleasure to be so. Feeling as keenly as she did the thorns of

a position which can only be likened to that of Saint-Laurence on his

grid-iron, is it any wonder that she sometimes cried out? So, in her

paroxysms of thwarted ambition, in the moments when her wounded vanity

gave her terrible shooting pains, Celestine turned upon Xavier

Rabourdin. Was it not her husband's duty to give her a suitable

position in the world? If she were a man she would have had the energy

to make a rapid fortune for the sake of rendering an adored wife

happy! She reproached him for being too honest a man. In the mouth of

some women this accusation is a charge of imbecility. She sketched out

for him certain brilliant plans in which she took no account of the

hindrances imposed by men and things; then, like all women under the

influence of vehement feeling, she became in thought as Machiavellian

as Gondreville, and more unprincipled than Maxime de Trailles. At such

times Celestine's mind took a wide range, and she imagined herself at

the summit of her ideas.

When these fine visions first began Rabourdin, who saw the practical

side, was cool. Celestine, much grieved, thought her husband narrow-

minded, timid, unsympathetic; and she acquired, insensibly, a wholly

false opinion of the companion of her life. In the first place, she

often extinguished him by the brilliancy of her arguments. Her ideas

came to her in flashes, and she sometimes stopped him short when he

began an explanation, because she did not choose to lose the slightest

sparkle of her own mind. From the earliest days of their marriage

Celestine, feeling herself beloved and admired by her husband, treated

him without ceremony; she put herself above conjugal laws and the

rules of private courtesy by expecting love to pardon all her little

wrong-doings; and, as she never in any way corrected herself, she was

always in the ascendant. In such a situation the man holds to the wife

very much the position of a child to a teacher when the latter cannot

or will not recognize that the mind he has ruled in childhood is

becoming mature. Like Madame de Stael, who exclaimed in a room full of

people, addressing, as we may say, a greater man than herself, "Do you

know you have really said something very profound!" Madame Rabourdin

said of her husband: "He certainly has a good deal of sense at times."

Her disparaging opinion of him gradually appeared in her behavior

through almost imperceptible motions. Her attitude and manners

expressed a want of respect. Without being aware of it she injured her

husband in the eyes of others; for in all countries society, before

making up its mind about a man, listens for what his wife thinks of

him, and obtains from her what the Genevese term "pre-advice."

When Rabourdin became aware of the mistakes which love had led him to

commit it was too late,--the groove had been cut; he suffered and was

silent. Like other men in whom sentiments and ideas are of equal

strength, whose souls are noble and their brains well balanced, he was

the defender of his wife before the tribunal of his own judgment; he

told himself that nature doomed her to a disappointed life through his

fault; HIS; she was like a thoroughbred English horse, a racer

harnessed to a cart full of stones; she it was who suffered; and he

blamed himself. His wife, by dint of constant repetition, had

inoculated him with her own belief in herself. Ideas are contagious in

a household; the ninth thermidor, like so many other portentous

events, was the result of female influence. Thus, goaded by

Celestine's ambition, Rabourdin had long considered the means of

satisfying it, though he hid his hopes, so as to spare her the

tortures of uncertainty. The man was firmly resolved to make his way

in the administration by bringing a strong light to bear upon it. He

intended to bring about one of those revolutions which send a man to

the head of either one party or another in society; but being

incapable of so doing in his own interests, he merely pondered useful

thoughts and dreamed of triumphs won for his country by noble means.

His ideas were both generous and ambitious; few officials have not

conceived the like; but among officials as among artists there are

more miscarriages than births; which is tantamount to Buffon's saying

that "Genius is patience."

Placed in a position where he could study French administration and

observe its mechanism, Rabourdin worked in the circle where his

thought revolved, which, we may remark parenthetically, is the secret

of much human accomplishment; and his labor culminated finally in the

invention of a new system for the Civil Service of government. Knowing

the people with whom he had to do, he maintained the machine as it

then worked, so it still works and will continue to work; for

everybody fears to remodel it, though no one, according to Rabourdin,

ought to be unwilling to simplify it. In his opinion, the problem to

be resolved lay in a better use of the same forces. His plan, in its

simplest form, was to revise taxation and lower it in a way that

should not diminish the revenues of the State, and to obtain, from a

budget equal to the budgets which now excite such rabid discussion,

results that should be two-fold greater than the present results. Long

practical experience had taught Rabourdin that perfection is brought

about in all things by changes in the direction of simplicity. To

economize is to simplify. To simplify means to suppress unnecessary

machinery; removals naturally follow. His system, therefore, depended

on the weeding out of officials and the establishment of a new order

of administrative offices. No doubt the hatred which all reformers

incur takes its rise here. Removals required by this perfecting

process, always ill-understood, threaten the well-being of those on

whom a change in their condition is thus forced. What rendered

Rabourdin really great was that he was able to restrain the enthusiasm

that possesses all reformers, and to patiently seek out a slow

evolving medium for all changes so as to avoid shocks, leaving time

and experience to prove the excellence of each reform. The grandeur of

the result anticipated might make us doubt its possibility if we lose

sight of this essential point in our rapid analysis of his system. It

is, therefore, not unimportant to show through his self-communings,

however incomplete they might be, the point of view from which he

looked at the administrative horizon. This tale, which is evolved from

the very heart of the Civil Service, may also serve to show some of

the evils of our present social customs.

Xavier Rabourdin, deeply impressed by the trials and poverty which he

witnessed in the lives of the government clerks, endeavored to

ascertain the cause of their growing deterioration. He found it in

those petty partial revolutions, the eddies, as it were, of the storm

of 1789, which the historians of great social movements neglect to

inquire into, although as a matter of fact it is they which have made

our manners and customs what they are now.

Formerly, under the monarchy, the bureaucratic armies did not exist.

The clerks, few in number, were under the orders of a prime minister

who communicated with the sovereign; thus they directly served the

king. The superiors of these zealous servants were simply called head-

clerks. In those branches of administration which the king did not

himself direct, such for instance as the "fermes" (the public domains

throughout the country on which a revenue was levied), the clerks were

to their superior what the clerks of a business-house are to their

employer; they learned a science which would one day advance them to

prosperity. Thus, all points of the circumference were fastened to the

centre and derived their life from it. The result was devotion and

confidence. Since 1789 the State, call it the Nation if you like, has

replaced the sovereign. Instead of looking directly to the chief

magistrate of this nation, the clerks have become, in spite of our

fine patriotic ideas, the subsidiaries of the government; their

superiors are blown about by the winds of a power called "the

administration," and do not know from day to day where they may be on

the morrow. As the routine of public business must go on, a certain

number of indispensable clerks are kept in their places, though they

hold these places on sufferance, anxious as they are to retain them.

Bureaucracy, a gigantic power set in motion by dwarfs, was generated

in this way. Though Napoleon, by subordinating all things and all men

to his will, retarded for a time the influence of bureaucracy (that

ponderous curtain hung between the service to be done and the man who

orders it), it was permanently organized under the constitutional

government, which was, inevitably, the friend of all mediocrities, the

lover of authentic documents and accounts, and as meddlesome as an old

tradeswoman. Delighted to see the various ministers constantly

struggling against the four hundred petty minds of the Elected of the

Chamber, with their ten or a dozen ambitious and dishonest leaders,

the Civil Service officials hastened to make themselves essential to

the warfare by adding their quota of assistance under the form of

written action; they created a power of inertia and named it "Report."

Let us explain the Report.

When the kings of France took to themselves ministers, which first

happened under Louis XV., they made them render reports on all

important questions, instead of holding, as formerly, grand councils

of state with the nobles. Under the constitutional government, the

ministers of the various departments were insensibly led by their

bureaus to imitate this practice of kings. Their time being taken up

in defending themselves before the two Chambers and the court, they

let themselves be guided by the leading-strings of the Report. Nothing

important was ever brought before the government that a minister did

not say, even when the case was urgent, "I have called for a report."

The Report thus became, both as to the matter concerned and for the

minister himself, the same as a report to the Chamber of Deputies on a

question of laws,--namely, a disquisition in which the reasons for and

against are stated with more or less partiality. No real result is

attained; the minister, like the Chamber, is fully as well prepared

before as after the report is rendered. A determination, in whatever

matter, is reached in an instant. Do what we will, the moment comes

when the decision must be made. The greater the array of reasons for

and against, the less sound will be the judgment. The finest things of

which France can boast have been accomplished without reports and

where decisions were prompt and spontaneous. The dominant law of a

statesman is to apply precise formula to all cases, after the manner

of judges and physicians.

Rabourdin, who said to himself: "A minister should have decision,

should know public affairs, and direct their course," saw "Report"

rampant throughout France, from the colonel to the marshal, from the

commissary of police to the king, from the prefects to the ministers

of state, from the Chamber to the courts. After 1818 everything was

discussed, compared, and weighed, either in speech or writing; public

business took a literary form. France went to ruin in spite of this

array of documents; dissertations stood in place of action; a million

of reports were written every year; bureaucracy was enthroned!

Records, statistics, documents, failing which France would have been

ruined, circumlocution, without which there could be no advance,

increased, multiplied, and grew majestic. From that day forth

bureaucracy used to its own profit the mistrust that stands between

receipts and expenditures; it degraded the administration for the

benefit of the administrators; in short, it spun those lilliputian

threads which have chained France to Parisian centralization,--as if

from 1500 to 1800 France had undertaken nothing for want of thirty

thousand government clerks! In fastening upon public offices, like a

mistletoe on a pear-tree, these officials indemnified themselves

amply, and in the following manner.

The ministers, compelled to obey the princes or the Chambers who

impose upon them the distribution of the public moneys, and forced to

retain the workers in office, proceeded to diminish salaries and

increase the number of those workers, thinking that if more persons

were employed by government the stronger the government would be. And

yet the contrary law is an axiom written on the universe; there is no

vigor except where there are few active principles. Events proved in

July, 1830, the error of the materialism of the Restoration. To plant

a government in the hearts of a nation it is necessary to bind

INTERESTS to it, not MEN. The government-clerks being led to detest

the administrations which lessened both their salaries and their

importance, treated them as a courtesan treats an aged lover, and gave

them mere work for money; a state of things which would have seemed as

intolerable to the administration as to the clerks, had the two

parties dared to feel each other's pulse, or had the higher salaries

not succeeded in stifling the voices of the lower. Thus wholly and

solely occupied in retaining his place, drawing his pay, and securing

his pension, the government official thought everything permissible

that conduced to these results. This state of things led to servility

on the part of the clerks and to endless intrigues within the various

departments, where the humbler clerks struggled vainly against

degenerate members of the aristocracy, who sought positions in the

government bureaus for their ruined sons.

Superior men could scarcely bring themselves to tread these tortuous

ways, to stoop, to cringe, and creep through the mire of these

cloacas, where the presence of a fine mind only alarmed the other

denizens. The ambitious man of genius grows old in obtaining his

triple crown; he does not follow in the steps of Sixtus the Fifth

merely to become head of a bureau. No one comes or stays in the

government offices but idlers, incapables, or fools. Thus the

mediocrity of French administration has slowly come about.

Bureaucracy, made up entirely of petty minds, stands as an obstacle to

the prosperity of the nation; delays for seven years, by its

machinery, the project of a canal which would have stimulated the

production of a province; is afraid of everything, prolongs

procrastination, and perpetuates the abuses which in turn perpetuate

and consolidate itself. Bureaucracy holds all things and the

administration itself in leading strings; it stifles men of talent who

are bold enough to be independent of it or to enlighten it on its own

follies. About the time of which we write the pension list had just

been issued, and on it Rabourdin saw the name of an underling in

office rated for a larger sum than the old colonels, maimed and

wounded for their country. In that fact lies the whole history of

bureaucracy.

Another evil, brought about by modern customs, which Rabourdin counted

among the causes of this secret demoralization, was the fact that

there is no real subordination in the administration in Paris;

complete equality reigns between the head of an important division and

the humblest copying-clerk; one is as powerful as the other in an

arena outside of which each lords it in his own way. Education,

equally distributed through the masses, brings the son of a porter

into a government office to decide the fate of some man of merit or

some landed proprietor whose door-bell his father may have answered.

The last comer is therefore on equal terms with the oldest veteran in

the service. A wealthy supernumerary splashes his superior as he

drives his tilbury to Longchamps and points with his whip to the poor

father of a family, remarking to the pretty woman at his side, "That's

my chief." The Liberals call this state of things Progress; Rabourdin

thought it Anarchy at the heart of power. He saw how it resulted in

restless intrigues, like those of a harem between eunuchs and women

and imbecile sultans, or the petty troubles of nuns full of underhand

vexations, or college tyrannies, or diplomatic manoeuvrings fit to

terrify an ambassador, all put in motion to obtain a fee or an

increase in salary; it was like the hopping of fleas harnessed to

pasteboard cars, the spitefulness of slaves, often visited on the

minister himself. With all this were the really useful men, the

workers, victims of such parasites; men sincerely devoted to their

country, who stood vigorously out from the background of the other

incapables, yet who were often forced to succumb through unworthy

trickery.

All the higher offices were gained through parliamentary influence,

royalty had nothing to do now with them, and the subordinate clerks

became, after a time, merely the running-gear of the machine; the most

important considerations with them being to keep the wheels well

greased. This fatal conviction entering some of the best minds

smothered many statements conscientiously written on the secret evils

of the national government; lowered the courage of many hearts, and

corrupted sterling honesty, weary of injustice and won to indifference

by deteriorating annoyances. A clerk in the employ of the Rothchilds

corresponds with all England; another, in a government office, may

communicate with all the prefects; but where the one learns the way to

make his fortune, the other loses time and health and life to no

avail. An undermining evil lies here. Certainly a nation does not seem

threatened with immediate dissolution because an able clerk is sent

away and a middling sort of man replaces him. Unfortunately for the

welfare of nations individual men never seem essential to their

existence. But in the long run when the belittling process is fully

carried out nations will disappear. Every one who seeks instruction on

this point can look at Venice, Madrid, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Rome; all

places which were formerly resplendent with mighty powers and are now

destroyed by the infiltrating littleness which gradually attained the

highest eminence. When the day of struggle came, all was found rotten,

the State succumbed to a weak attack. To worship the fool who

succeeds, and not to grieve over the fall of an able man is the result

of our melancholy education, of our manners and customs which drive

men of intellect into disgust, and genius to despair.

What a difficult undertaking is the rehabilitation of the Civil

Service while the liberal cries aloud in his newspapers that the

salaries of clerks are a standing theft, calls the items of the budget

a cluster of leeches, and every year demands why the nation should be

saddled with a thousand millions of taxes. In Monsieur Rabourdin's

eyes the clerk in relation to the budget was very much what the

gambler is to the game; that which he wins he puts back again. All

remuneration implies something furnished. To pay a man a thousand

francs a year and demand his whole time was surely to organize theft

and poverty. A galley-slave costs nearly as much, and does less. But

to expect a man whom the State remunerated with twelve thousand francs

a year to devote himself to his country was a profitable contract for

both sides, fit to allure all capacities.

These reflections had led Rabourdin to desire the recasting of the

clerical official staff. To employ fewer man, to double or treble

salaries, and do away with pensions, to choose only young clerks (as

did Napoleon, Louis XIV., Richelieu, and Ximenes), but to keep them

long and train them for the higher offices and greatest honors, these

were the chief features of a reform which if carried out would be as

beneficial to the State as to the clerks themselves. It is difficult

to recount in detail, chapter by chapter, a plan which embraced the

whole budget and continued down through the minutest details of

administration in order to keep the whole synthetical; but perhaps a

slight sketch of the principal reforms will suffice for those who

understand such matters, as well as for those who are wholly ignorant

of the administrative system. Though the historian's position is

rather hazardous in reproducing a plan which may be thought the

politics of a chimney-corner, it is, nevertheless, necessary to sketch

it so as to explain the author of it by his own work. Were the recital

of his efforts to be omitted, the reader would not believe the

narrator's word if he merely declared the talent and the courage of

this official.

Rabourdin's plan divided the government into three ministries, or

departments. He thought that if the France of former days possessed

brains strong enough to comprehend in one system both foreign and

domestic affairs, the France of to-day was not likely to be without

its Mazarin, its Suger, its Sully, its de Choiseul, or its Colbert to

direct even vast administrative departments. Besides, constitutionally

speaking, three ministries will agree better than seven; and, in the

restricted number there is less chance for mistaken choice; moreover,

it might be that the kingdom would some day escape from those

perpetual ministerial oscillations which interfered with all plans of

foreign policy and prevented all ameliorations of home rule. In

Austria, where many diverse united nations present so many conflicting

interests to be conciliated and carried forward under one crown, two

statesmen alone bear the burden of public affairs and are not

overwhelmed by it. Was France less prolific of political capacities

than Germany? The rather silly game of what are called "constitutional

institutions" carried beyond bounds has ended, as everybody knows, in

requiring a great many offices to satisfy the multifarious ambition of

the middle classes. It seemed to Rabourdin, in the first place,

natural to unite the ministry of war with the ministry of the navy. To

his thinking the navy was one of the current expenses of the war

department, like the artillery, cavalry, infantry, and commissariat.

Surely it was an absurdity to give separate administrations to

admirals and marshals when both were employed to one end, namely, the

defense of the nation, the overthrow of an enemy, and the security of

the national possessions. The ministry of the interior ought in like

manner to combine the departments of commerce, police, and finances,

or it belied its own name. To the ministry of foreign affairs belonged

the administration of justice, the household of the king, and all that

concerned arts, sciences, and belles lettres. All patronage ought to

flow directly from the sovereign. Such ministries necessitated the

supremacy of a council. Each required the work of two hundred

officials, and no more, in its central administration offices, where

Rabourdin proposed that they should live, as in former days under the

monarchy. Taking the sum of twelve thousand francs a year for each

official as an average, he estimated seven millions as the cost of the

whole body of such officials, which actually stood at twenty in the

budget.

By thus reducing the ministers to three heads he suppressed

departments which had come to be useless, together with the enormous

costs of their maintenance in Paris. He proved that an arrondissement

could be managed by ten men; a prefecture by a dozen at the most;

which reduced the entire civil service force throughout France to five

thousand men, exclusive of the departments of war and justice. Under

this plan the clerks of the court were charged with the system of

loans, and the ministry of the interior with that of registration and

the management of domains. Thus Rabourdin united in one centre all

divisions that were allied in nature. The mortgage system,

inheritance, and registration did not pass outside of their own sphere

of action and only required three additional clerks in the justice

courts and three in the royal courts. The steady application of this

principle brought Rabourdin to reforms in the finance system. He

merged the collection of revenue into one channel, taxing consumption

in bulk instead of taxing property. According to his ideas,

consumption was the sole thing properly taxable in times of peace.

Land-taxes should always be held in reserve in case of war; for then

only could the State justly demand sacrifices from the soil, which was

in danger; but in times of peace it was a serious political fault to

burden it beyond a certain limit; otherwise it could never be depended

on in great emergencies. Thus a loan should be put on the market when

the country was tranquil, for at such times it could be placed at par,

instead of at fifty per cent loss as in bad times; in war times resort

should be had to a land-tax.

"The invasion of 1814 and 1815," Rabourdin would say to his friends,

"founded in France and practically explained an institution which

neither Law nor Napoleon had been able to establish,--I mean Credit."

Unfortunately, Xavier considered the true principles of this admirable

machine of civil service very little understood at the period when he

began his labor of reform in 1820. His scheme levied a toll on the

consumption by means of direct taxation and suppressed the whole

machinery of indirect taxation. The levying of the taxes was

simplified by a single classification of a great number of articles.

This did away with the more harassing customs at the gates of the

cities, and obtained the largest revenues from the remainder, by

lessening the enormous expense of collecting them. To lighten the

burden of taxation is not, in matters of finance, to diminish the

taxes, but to assess them better; if lightened, you increase the

volume of business by giving it freer play; the individual pays less

and the State receives more. This reform, which may seem immense,

rests on very simple machinery. Rabourdin regarded the tax on personal

property as the most trustworthy representative of general

consumption. Individual fortunes are usually revealed in France by

rentals, by the number of servants, horses, carriages, and luxuries,

the costs of which are all to the interest of the public treasury.

Houses and what they contain vary comparatively but little, and are

not liable to disappear. After pointing out the means of making a tax-

list on personal property which should be more impartial than the

existing list, Rabourdin assessed the sums to be brought into the

treasury by indirect taxation as so much per cent on each individual

share. A tax is a levy of money on things or persons under disguises

that are more or less specious. These disguises, excellent when the

object is to extort money, become ridiculous in the present day, when

the class on which the taxes weigh the heaviest knows why the State

imposes them and by what machinery they are given back. In fact the

budget is not a strong-box to hold what is put into it, but a

watering-pot; the more it takes in and the more it pours out the

better for the prosperity of the country. Therefore, supposing there

are six millions of tax-payers in easy circumstances (Rabourdin proved

their existence, including the rich) is it not better to make them pay

a duty on the consumption of wine, which would not be more offensive

than that on doors and windows and would return a hundred millions,

rather than harass them by taxing the thing itself. By this system of

taxation, each individual tax-payer pays less in reality, while the

State receives more, and consumers profit by a vast reduction in the

price of things which the State releases from its perpetual and

harassing interference. Rabourdin's scheme retained a tax on the

cultivation of vineyards, so as to protect that industry from the too

great abundance of its own products. Then, to reach the consumption of

the poorer tax-payers, the licences of retail dealers were taxed

according to the population of the neighborhoods in which they lived.

In this way, the State would receive without cost or vexatious

hindrances an enormous revenue under three forms; namely, a duty on

wine, on the cultivation of vineyards, and on licenses, where now an

irritating array of taxes existed as a burden on itself and its

officials. Taxation was thus imposed upon the rich without

overburdening the poor. To give another example. Suppose a share

assessed to each person of one or two francs for the consumption of

salt and you obtain ten or a dozen millions; the modern "gabelle"

disappears, the poor breathe freer, agriculture is relieved, the State

receives as much, and no tax-payer complains. All persons, whether

they belong to the industrial classes or to the capitalists, will see

at once the benefits of a tax so assessed when they discover how

commerce increases, and life is ameliorated in the country districts.

In short, the State will see from year to year the number of her well-

to-do tax-payers increasing. By doing away with the machinery of

indirect taxation, which is very costly (a State, as it were, within a

State), both the public finances and the individual tax-payer are

greatly benefited, not to speak of the saving in costs of collecting.

The whole subject is indeed less a question of finance than a question

of government. The State should possess nothing of its own, neither

forests, nor mines, nor public works. That it should be the owner of

domains was, in Rabourdin's opinion, an administrative contradiction.

The State cannot turn its possessions to profit and it deprives itself

of taxes; it thus loses two forms of production. As to the

manufactories of the government, they are just as unreasonable in the

sphere of industry. The State obtains products at a higher cost than

those of commerce, produces them more slowly, and loses its tax upon

the industry, the maintenance of which it, in turn, reduces. Can it be

thought a proper method of governing a country to manufacture instead

of promoting manufactures? to possess property instead of creating

more possessions and more diverse ones? In Rabourdin's system the

State exacted no money security; he allowed only mortgage securities;

and for this reason: Either the State holds the security in specie,

and that embarrasses business and the movement of money; or it invests

it at a higher rate than the State itself pays, and that is a

contemptible robbery; or else it loses on the transaction, and that is

folly; moreover, if it is obliged at any time to dispose of a mass of

these securities it gives rises in certain cases to terrible

bankruptcy.

The territorial tax did not entirely disappear in Rabourdin's plan,--

he kept a minute portion of it as a point of departure in case of war;

but the productions of the soil were freed, and industry, finding raw

material at a low price, could compete with foreign nations without

the deceptive help of customs. The rich carried on the administration

of the provinces without compensation except that of receiving a

peerage under certain conditions. Magistrates, learned bodies,

officers of the lower grades found their services honorably rewarded;

no man employed by the government failed to obtain great consideration

through the value and extent of his labors and the excellence of his

salary; every one was able to provide for his own future and France

was delivered from the cancer of pensions. As a result Rabourdin's

scheme exhibited only seven hundred millions of expenditures and

twelve hundred millions of receipts. A saving of five hundred millions

annually had far more virtue than the accumulation of a sinking fund

whose dangers were plainly to be seen. In that fund the State,

according to Rabourdin, became a stockholder, just as it persisted in

being a land-holder and a manufacturer. To bring about these reforms

without too roughly jarring the existing state of things or incurring

a Saint-Bartholomew of clerks, Rabourdin considered that an evolution

of twenty years would be required.

Such were the thoughts maturing in Rabourdin's mind ever since his

promised place had been given to Monsieur de la Billardiere, a man of

sheer incapacity. This plan, so vast apparently yet so simple in point

of fact, which did away with so many large staffs and so many little

offices all equally useless, required for its presentation to the

public mind close calculations, precise statistics, and self-evident

proof. Rabourdin had long studied the budget under its double-aspect

of ways and means and of expenditure. Many a night he had lain awake

unknown to his wife. But so far he had only dared to conceive the plan

and fit it prospectively to the administrative skeleton; all of which

counted for nothing,--he must gain the ear of a minister capable of

appreciating his ideas. Rabourdin's success depended on the tranquil

condition of political affairs, which up to this time were still

unsettled. He had not considered the government as permanently secure

until three hundred deputies at least had the courage to form a

compact majority systematically ministerial. An administration founded

on that basis had come into power since Rabourdin had finished his

elaborate plan. At this time the luxury of peace under the Bourbons

had eclipsed the warlike luxury of the days when France shone like a

vast encampment, prodigal and magnificent because it was victorious.

After the Spanish campaign, the administration seemed to enter upon an

era of tranquillity in which some good might be accomplished; and

three months before the opening of our story a new reign had begun

without any apparent opposition; for the liberalism of the Left had

welcomed Charles X. with as much enthusiasm as the Right. Even clear-

sighted and suspicious persons were misled. The moment seemed

propitious for Rabourdin. What could better conduce to the stability

of the government than to propose and carry through a reform whose

beneficial results were to be so vast?

Never had Rabourdin seemed so anxious and preoccupied as he now did in

the mornings as he walked from his house to the ministry, or at half-

past four in the afternoon, when he returned. Madame Rabourdin, on her

part, disconsolate over her wasted life, weary of secretly working to

obtain a few luxuries of dress, never appeared so bitterly

discontented as now; but, like any wife who is really attached to her

husband, she considered it unworthy of a superior woman to condescend

to the shameful devices by which the wives of some officials eke out

the insufficiency of their husband's salary. This feeling made her

refuse all intercourse with Madame Colleville, then very intimate with

Francois Keller, whose parties eclipsed those of the rue Duphot.

Nevertheless, she mistook the quietude of the political thinker and

the preoccupation of the intrepid worker for the apathetic torpor of

an official broken down by the dulness of routine, vanquished by that

most hateful of all miseries, the mediocrity that simply earns a

living; and she groaned at being married to a man without energy.

Thus it was that about this period in their lives she resolved to take

the making of her husband's fortune on herself; to thrust him at any

cost into a higher sphere, and to hide from him the secret springs of

her machinations. She carried into all her plans the independence of

ideas which characterized her, and was proud to think that she could

rise above other women by sharing none of their petty prejudices and

by keeping herself untrammelled by the restraints which society

imposes. In her anger she resolved to fight fools with their own

weapons, and to make herself a fool if need be. She saw things coming

to a crisis. The time was favorable. Monsieur de la Billardiere,

attacked by a dangerous illness, was likely to die in a few days. If

Rabourdin succeeded him, his talents (for Celestine did vouchsafe him

an administrative gift) would be so thoroughly appreciated that the

office of Master of petitions, formerly promised, would now be given

to him; she fancied she saw him the king's commissioner, presenting

bills to the Chambers and defending them; then indeed she could help

him; she would even be, if needful, his secretary; she would sit up

all night to do the work! All this to drive in the Bois in a pretty

carriage, to equal Madame Delphine de Nucingen, to raise her salon to

the level of Madame Colleville's, to be invited to the great

ministerial solemnities, to win listeners and make them talk of her as

"Madame Rabourdin DE something or other" (she had not yet determined

on the estate), just as they did of Madame Firmiani, Madame d'Espard,

Madame d'Aiglemont, Madame de Carigliano, and thus efface forever the

odious name of Rabourdin.

These secret schemes brought some changes into the household. Madame

Rabourdin began to walk with a firm step in the path of DEBT. She set

up a manservant, and put him in livery of brown cloth with red pipins,

she renewed parts of her furniture, hung new papers on the walls,

adorned her salon with plants and flowers, always fresh, and crowded

it with knick-knacks that were then in vogue; then she, who had always

shown scruples as to her personal expenses, did not hesitate to put

her dress in keeping with the rank to which she aspired, the profits

of which were discounted in several of the shops where she equipped

herself for war. To make her "Wednesdays" fashionable she gave a

dinner on Fridays, the guests being expected to pay their return visit

and take a cup of tea on the following Wednesday. She chose her guests

cleverly among influential deputies or other persons of note who,

sooner or later, might advance her interests. In short, she gathered

an agreeable and befitting circle about her. People amused themselves

at her house; they said so at least, which is quite enough to attract

society in Paris. Rabourdin was so absorbed in completing his great

and serious work that he took no notice of the sudden reappearance of

luxury in the bosom of his family.

Thus the wife and the husband were besieging the same fortress,

working on parallel lines, but without each other's knowledge.