If the cashier is possessed of an imagination or of a fervid temperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete cashier, he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has ambitions, or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is undone.  Search the chronicles of the counting-house.  You will not find a single instance of a cashier attaining a position, as it is called.  They are sent to the hulks; they go to foreign parts; they vegetate on a second floor in the Rue Saint-Louis among the market gardens of the Marais.  Some day, when the cashiers of Paris come to a sense of their real value, a cashier will be hardly obtainable for money.  Still, certain it is that there are people who are fit for nothing but to be cashiers, just as the bent of a certain order of mind inevitably makes for rascality.  But, oh marvel of our civilization!  Society rewards virtue with an income of a hundred louis in old age, a dwelling on a second floor, bread sufficient, occasional new bandana handkerchiefs, an elderly wife and her offspring.

So much for virtue.  But for the opposite course, a little boldness, a faculty for keeping on the windward side of the law, as Turenne outflanked Montecuculli, and Society will sanction the theft of millions, shower ribbons upon the thief, cram him with honors, and smother him with consideration.

Government, moreover, works harmoniously with this profoundly illogical reasoner—­Society.  Government levies a conscription on the young intelligence of the kingdom at the age of seventeen or eighteen, a conscription of precocious power.  Great ability is prematurely exhausted by excessive brain work before it is sent up to be submitted to a process of selection.  Nurserymen sort and select seeds in much the same way.  To this process the Government brings professional appraisers of talent, men who can assay brains as experts assay gold at the Mint.  Five hundred such heads, set afire with hope, are sent up annually by the most progressive portion of the population; and of these the Government takes one third, puts them in sacks called the Ecoles, and shakes them up together for three years.  Though every one of these young plants represents vast productive power, they are made, as one may say, into cashiers.  They receive appointments; the rank and file of engineers is made up of them; they are employed as captains of artillery; there is no (subaltern) grade to which they may not aspire.  Finally, when these men, the pick of the youth of the nation, fattened on mathematics and stuffed with knowledge, have attained the age of fifty years, they have their reward, and receive as the price of their services the third-floor lodging, the wife and family, and all the comforts that sweeten life for mediocrity.  If from among this race of dupes there should escape some five or six men of genius who climb the highest heights, is it not miraculous?