Not a bad posture, either, for certain reptile souls.

Certain ways are impracticable, except by crawling flat on the belly.

An obscure but fattening servitude had long made up Barkilphedro’s whole existence.  Service is something; but he wanted power besides.  He was, perhaps, about to reach it when James II. fell.  He had to begin all over again.  Nothing to do under William III., a sullen prince, and exercising in his mode of reigning a prudery which he believed to be probity.  Barkilphedro, when his protector, James II., was dethroned, did not lapse all at once into rags.  There is a something which survives deposed princes, and which feeds and sustains their parasites.  The remains of the exhaustible sap causes leaves to live on for two or three days on the branches of the uprooted tree; then, all at once, the leaf yellows and dries up:  and thus it is with the courtier.

Thanks to that embalming which is called legitimacy, the prince himself, although fallen and cast away, lasts and keeps preserved; it is not so with the courtier, much more dead than the king.  The king, beyond there, is a mummy; the courtier, here, is a phantom.  To be the shadow of a shadow is leanness indeed.  Hence Barkilphedro became famished.  Then he took up the character of a man of letters.

But he was thrust back even from the kitchens.  Sometimes he knew not where to sleep.  “Who will give me shelter?” he would ask.  He struggled on.  All that is interesting in patience in distress he possessed.  He had, besides, the talent of the termite—­knowing how to bore a hole from the bottom to the top.  By dint of making use of the name of James II., of old memories, of fables of fidelity, of touching stories, he pierced as far as the Duchess Josiana’s heart.

Josiana took a liking to this man of poverty and wit, an interesting combination.  She presented him to Lord Dirry-Moir, gave him a shelter in the servants’ hall among her domestics, retained him in her household, was kind to him, and sometimes even spoke to him.  Barkilphedro felt neither hunger nor cold again.  Josiana addressed him in the second person; it was the fashion for great ladies to do so to men of letters, who allowed it.  The Marquise de Mailly received Roy, whom she had never seen before, in bed, and said to him, “C’est toi qui as fait l’Annee galante!  Bonjour.”  Later on, the men of letters returned the custom.  The day came when Fabre d’Eglantine said to the Duchesse de Rohan, “N’est-tu pas la Chabot?”

For Barkilphedro to be “thee’d” and “thou’d” was a success; he was overjoyed by it.  He had aspired to this contemptuous familiarity.  “Lady Josiana thees-and-thous me,” he would say to himself.  And he would rub his hands.  He profited by this theeing-and-thouing to make further way.  He became a sort of constant attendant in Josiana’s private rooms; in no way troublesome; unperceived; the duchess would almost have changed her shift before him.  All this, however, was precarious.  Barkilphedro was aiming at a position.  A duchess was half-way; an underground passage which did not lead to the queen was having bored for nothing.